Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

 

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Thumbnail image credit: Auntie P

Podcast Sponsors

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Over the past year, my 12-year-old son has been doing one challenge every week as a rite of passage and a chance to earn a special trip. Some of these challenges have involved reading a book in a week, and the most recent book we gave him was How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. His review, he said it was the best book he’s read so far.

So a book written almost 90 years ago can still be a favorite of a kid in the 21st century, talk about some staying power. The advice in How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Dale Carnegie’s other classic, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is timeless, but to help introduce it to a new audience, my guest Joe Hart, has recently co-authored the book, Take Command, which synthesizes updates and adds to the principles of Carnegie’s two perennial bestsellers.

Joe is the president and CEO of Dale Carnegie & Associates, which continues Carnegie work in the present day. And we begin our conversation with some background on the guy who kicked off this word back in 1936. We then talk about what principles we can take from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living when developing a positive mindset.

From there, we talk about the big overarching principle of How To Win Friends and Influence People, and how you can use it to improve your relationships. We end our conversation with how to live life with more intentionality and meaning. After the show’s over check out our show notes at aom.is/carnegie.

Alright, Joe Hart. Welcome to the show.

Joe Hart: Thank you. Thanks, Brett. Glad to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are the president of Dale Carnegie & Associates. Dale Carnegie, he famously wrote, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Let’s talk about Dale for a second, big picture. What are those books about that he wrote and how did Dale Carnegie’s background put them in a position to write these classic books?

Joe Hart: Dale Carnegie is one of the most incredible people. I’ve always loved biographies, reading about people. His life is truly, was an extraordinary one, he was brilliant in terms of his insights. But he started in a really nondescript way. He was born on a farm in Missouri. He was fairly poor.

And he had a struggling childhood. Wonderful warm family, parents who loved him, a brother, a nice family that supported him, but they struggled. And the reason why that’s important is he really always had the sense of wanting to overcome poverty and establish a level of security.

His parents had moved near a college when he was in his teen years so that he could attend college, and he did, and in that experience he discovered that he had a gift for debate, for public speaking and so forth, and that kind of instilled in him a desire to really, to learn and to leverage that.

He started after college in sales, he had one sales experience that wasn’t great, and then he went on to become really an extraordinary sales person for the Armour meatpacking company, and rather than going into management, he decided to go to New York City. At that time he wanted to study acting. He discovered that he was not a great actor, and ultimately in 1912 began offering classes at the YMCA in New York City on public speaking.

And there he was, he’s at the front of the room, and he was teaching techniques of public speaking and he was running out of things to say. So he started to invite the participants up to the room as he started to notice that they were getting bored, and he discovered just the power of having someone stand up in front of an audience and try to present and articulate themselves, and the fear and the lack of competent, all the different things that went along that.

And so that was the beginning in 1912 of the Dale Carnegie course. Now 110 years later plus, and so many millions and millions of people who’ve taken that program, it started around public speaking, but what he discovered was that it was really more about even human relations and the things that hold us back, and how do we overcome the limiting beliefs that we have.

Brett McKay: So How to Win Friends and Influence People. This was written in the 1930s, correct?

Joe Hart: Right, 1936.

Brett McKay: 1936. And this came out of a course he was teaching. And then tell us about the impact. We’re talking about it today, but what influence or what impact did it have on the culture when it first came out?

Joe Hart: It was an immediate cultural phenomenon. And it was interesting, you think about you’re still in the midst of The Depression and challenges and so forth, and even prior to the book, the book was an outgrowth as you said correctly, Brett, from the courses. In fact, the way the book came about was because there was a man named Leon Shimkin who worked for Simon & Schuster, who was taking one of Dale’s programs, he said, “This is fantastic. You should really turn this into a book,” and Dale didn’t originally wanna do that.

But Leon Shimkin convinced him to, “At least let us record what you’re doing,” and that became How to Win Friends and Influence People, at least the first version of it. But when that book came out in 1936, Dale himself didn’t know what to expect, but it immediately became a success, and it’s been a best-selling book now for over 85 years.

Brett McKay: It’s one of the top selling books of the 20th century. Correct?

Joe Hart: Yeah. It’s certainly one of the best-selling books of all time. In fact, the New York Public Library not long ago did a survey of the most checked out books ever, and that was I think in the top five. Time had listed it as one of the most influential books ever as well.

So the impact of this, and the reason why this book has been so successful is I think, number one, Dale Carnegie had a phenomenal ability to tell stories, and really the book is of about stories, but it’s about the insights about how people can interact with each other more successfully.

For people to read this, they have their own epiphanies about either relationships that they have or things that they need to do, or how they can advance their lives and their careers, and so it’s been a catalyst for so many people to just ignite amazing results in their lives.

Which is why you and I were talking before we started just about having your son read How To Win Friends, and so many people will tell me that their father, their mother had them How To Win Friends in their teenage years. We just had an international convention in New York City, and some of the speakers is hugely successful business people had said that, “I read this book when I was younger, and it was formative, it was foundational in terms of my life, in my career and everything that followed.”

Brett McKay: How does the Dale Carnegie & Associates Company carry on the work laid down by Dale Carnegie? ‘Cause I was surprised that there’s still a Dale Carnegie company going strong in 2023.

Joe Hart: Yeah, thankfully. Stronger than ever. We are an organization that has 200 operations in over 80 countries. We’re a global organization, we’ve got thousands of people that are part of Dale Carnegie. We operate regionally, so you can actually take a Dale Carnegie program in person or you could take one online.

But there are a number of different things that we’re teaching. One of the programs is the Dale Carnegie course. If you googled “Dale Carnegie and Warren Buffet”, you’d watch a video of him talking about how when he took the Dale Carnegie course as a young person, it completely just changed everything for him. His would not be the same.

That’s the Dale Carnegie course, that course is about interpersonal skills and self-confidence and leadership and stress and worry, really how to present effectively. We have individuals that will take that course, we’ll have companies that will bring us in and we’ll provide that really is a cultural tool to help create stronger, more higher performing teams in organizations. We work with 400 of the Fortune 500 companies. T.

But that program is the one that he had started, has changed over the years, but it’s available in 32 languages. We’ve got leadership programs and sales programs, and a whole range of other kinds of things.

Brett McKay: So I was thinking about when I discovered Dale Carnegie and it was in high school. I don’t remember how I found it. I think I might have just stumbled upon it and Barnes & Noble and picked it up and bought it and just like, “This is great.” Underlined it, highlighted it. I’m curious, how did you discover Dale Carnegie? How did his work changed your life?

Joe Hart: It’s interesting, Brett. My experience was maybe little bit similar to yours in the sense that I was a teenager and my father… My father had a huge influence on me, he always believed that life was about personal growth, and he was talking about goal setting and different kinds of things.

One of the things he shared with me was Dale Carnegie, How to Win France and influence people. And admittedly, I’d love to tell you that I read that cover to cover over and over at that time, and I really, I didn’t. I read it and I thought it was great. I was really impressed by what I read and I thought about my father and just how amazing my dad was interacting with with other people.

But it planted the seed even more so that when I was in my 20s, I was a young lawyer and I wanted to take a Dale Carnegie course, and I wanted to do that just because I wanted to invest to myself and advance my career and so forth. And that was one of the most defining moments of my life, walking into that class, because it truly helped me change my view of myself and gave me skills in terms of how to interact with people more effectively.

I think as a young lawyer, I was a little bit, oh, hard-edged, arrogant, maybe not particularly empathetic, and it just completely opened my eyes. And people started to notice immediately, they’re like, “You seem very different,” and so forth. I really started to apply the Dale Carnegie principles.

It also challenged me on vision. So one of the things and early in the Dale Carnegie program we talk about is living an intentional life, and so many people go through their lives and they just find themselves older and they say, “Gosh, I didn’t do the things I wanted to do, I didn’t take the chances I wanted. I didn’t really… Just life passed me by.”

And the program says, “What’s your vision for yourself? What’s your vision for yourself in six months? What’s your vision for yourself in years?” So I ultimately decided to leave the practice of law because I said, “You know, I may be a successful lawyer but I’m not necessarily a happy lawyer,” and I went into business from there.

And in fact, it was Dell Carnegie that inspired me to start my first business because that first business was an e-learning company in 2000 that was all about helping people apply things that they learned in training programs. And in fact, Dale Carnegie became my first client. I developed e-learning programs in the early 2000s for Dale Carnegie that were used in multiple languages and countries all over the world.

Brett McKay: So you have a new book out you co-authored with Michael Crom called, Take Command: Find Your Inner strength, Build Enduring Relationships, and Live the Life You Want. And what you’ve done, you’ve taken the ideas from Dale Carnegie and you’ve updated ’em for the 21st century.

And to be clear, what I love about Dale Carnegie is his stuff’s timeless. The things that are applied in 1936 are still applicable today. But things are different. We have the internet now. We have online communication. That didn’t exist when Dale wrote these books.

And then also what’s interesting too is a lot of the insights that Dale had in his books about social relationships and confidence, it’s been interesting to see in the past 20 years, those ideas being verified by psychology or the social sciences. And you talk about those insights in this book.

You divide the book into three parts. The first part, you focus on taking command of your thoughts and emotions, and this was a big theme in Carnegie’s book, How to Stop worrying. And I love How to Stop Worrying. I ever have those periods in my life when I’m just, things are going crazy and I’m feeling overwhelmed, I always bust out that book, flip open a random page and you’ll find some insight that will like, “Oh, okay. That gives me some perspective. It gives me a tool.”

Let’s talk about getting to handle on our thoughts. What advice did Dale have about avoiding negative thinking? ‘Cause I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with.

Joe Hart: Yeah, it’s interesting just to go back to what you’re saying, because How to Stop Worrying and Start Living may be the lesser known of Dale Carnegie’s books and yet in so many ways, particularly given all that we’ve gone through over the past several years and all of the stress in the world, is such a meaningful and valuable book.

In fact, that book for me was a critical one in terms of challenges I faced during the pandemic and leading a company, living a global company, and all the stress and so forth. But that book really outlines his thinking about, it’s how to stop worrying and start living, and that really comes down to how do we manage our thoughts and our emotions.

He had a whole range of principles that he talked about, I’ll talk about a couple of those in a moment, but I think the big epiphany for me is when he really talks about the power of our mindset. He’s not using the word “mindset” like we might today, but the power of our thoughts.

And how you can have two people in the exact same situation with the same set of facts that one person is miserable and then the other person is thrilled, and what’s the difference? The difference is how we think and the things that we tell ourselves and how we process our thoughts.

And so much of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is really getting people to think about their thoughts and to change their thoughts and to look at things differently. Sometimes people will say, “Well, is that just simply changing… You’re overlooking challenges or you’re living rose-colored glasses,” and that’s not it at all.

Dale Carnegie was a realist and certainly went through challenges in his life, but his point would be that if you focus on the right frame or way of thinking, you can overcome challenges far more effectively than if all you’re doing is focused on problems and so forth. So some of the different techniques that he talked about and some of the different maybe ideas, which today we might say, “Well, of course that seems obvious,” but at the time, maybe not so much.

And the other thing we say, Brett, is that often these things are common sense but they’re not common practice. But actually taking a step and filling your mind with thoughts of peace, courage, health and hope. So what are the things I’m saying to myself, what are the things I’m observing? What are the things I’m thinking?

So if I think back about the pandemic, this was a pivotal idea for me, because there was a point in time where my mind was just going to the worst possible outcomes and results as all these things were happening, and it’s like, “Well, wait a second. If in fact every action has an opposite and equal reaction and this is an unprecedented crisis, where’s the opportunity here?”

We flipped and changed our entire business significantly, and I think that was because the people in our organization had the mindset that said, “You know, this is really incredible that our entire operation is being shut down because we were face-to-face in-person classes at that time, but how do we pivot?” And we did pivot, but part of that was around how we thought.

Another thing might be around asking yourself what’s the worst possible thing that can happen, accepting that and then working back. So often we generate just so much negativity and fear and worry because we think about all these bad things that are gonna happen. But the second that we accept, “Alright, what’s the worst possible thing that could happen?” and then you work back from that, it releases the ability to think with clarity and to build something we see ourselves [0:15:27.7] ____.

First of all, it’s probably not gonna happen. And second of all, even if it does happen, I can deal with that, I can work through that or where do I go from here? So those are a couple of the things he talked about. One other one that we talk about in the book, which is along these lines is cooperating with the inevitable.

So much of the challenge we have with change, so we talk about change, there’s a lot of change in the world and changes a constant. But it’s our resistance to change, it’s the fighting, it’s the worry around it. But if we accept that some things are going to happen, then we can put ourselves in a position to build from that and to be more constructive in terms of what kind of results we really want.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talking about developing a positive mindset. This is something that Dale Carnegie talked a lot about. ‘Cause he understood that people, they wanna be around cheerful people, that’s something we… I like to be around cheerful people, it’s tough to be around people who are Debbie Downers. What did Dale say about some practices we can incorporate to develop a more positive mindset?

Joe Hart: Well, one of the things he talked about was, and he says this kinda glibly, is it a bad thing for us to give ourselves a pep talk? And he says, no, it’s not. We have this voice in our head or these thoughts that go through our minds, and often they are negative. They are, “You can’t do this,” or, “You’re not very good.” Or, “Why would you try that? You’re just gonna fail.” Or whatever those things are.

Part of his advice was to confront those kinds of thoughts, those voices if you will, and to focus on the things that have worked for you, focus on your successes. Give yourself a pep talk. And that’s one of the things we talk about in the book as well, which is, people are capable of so much more than they often think that they are.

They’ve gotta have focus on perspective, look back to look forward. And if you can’t do that for yourself, find someone who can help bring that out in you, have someone to talk to who will reaffirm for you those positive things that are about who you are. But one of the things again he talked about was give yourself a pep talk.

He also talked about expecting or counting your blessings. So this goes to mindset, looking at the things that are going right, instead of the things that are going wrong. At any given time we can think about the whole innumerable things in our lives that aren’t the way that we want them to be.

And his point is, just time out. What are the things that you’re gonna look at that are positive, that you should have to be thankful for? He talks a lot about gratitude and how it’s very difficult to be grateful and unhappy at the same time. He encourages people to act enthusiastic and you’ll be enthusiastic, so to speak.

Or act on with confidence and you’ll be confident. Put your shoulders back, put a smile on your face. Do some of these kinds of things that if you do them, you’re gonna start all of a sudden becoming and believing that. And why not, because this is the life that you have, why not live it fully?

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think a lot of people feel silly doing those things ’cause it makes them feel like Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live. But the alternative, as you said is, well, you could just be negative and feel unconfident. So just give it a try. What do you got to lose? You not have to do it in front of people, you can give yourself a pep talk in your closet before you go off to work, you don’t have to do it in front of people, out in public.

Joe Hart: That’s right. Over the years, and again, Dale was one of the first people to start to articulate these ideas and these thoughts. So now, of course, all these years later, there’s a whole range of other people out there who’ve done other kinds of things, and he was never the Stuart Smalley kind of a mindset.

You can do some of these things on your own, you can have a conversation in your own mind, but what he’s basically saying is you need to focus, you need to think about how you wanna think. And you can create the life that you want if you think a certain way. He quotes, and one of the most powerful quotes in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living comes from the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who says, “Our lives are what our thoughts make it.”

Our lives are what our thoughts make it. So if I’m dwelling on just all the things that are going wrong or all kinds of problems, then yeah, I probably can expect things aren’t gonna go very well for me. On the other hand… And by the way, and Dale Carnegie is a global organization, we conduct research.

We’ve conducted research on resilience and agility, and part of what we found is that people who expect better results generally get them, and they get them because their mindset is conditioned to look for them, to look for opportunity. But if my mindset is, “There is no opportunity. This is a failure,” there’s nothing good that’s gonna come from that. I’m not gonna see those things, even though they could be right in front of my face.

Brett McKay: One of the key insights that Dale Carnegie had, I’m gonna quote it, I think this was in How to Win Friends and Influence People, but we’re gonna bring this back to how this applies to us individually, it’s this. He says, “When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic, we’re dealing with creatures of emotion.”

And we’re probably gonna talk about this when we talk about How to Win Friends and Influence People, but this idea that we’d like to think we’re rational agents and we are to an extent, but we also have these emotions. What did Dale say about how we can get control of our emotions so that we can have those private victories in our own personal lives?

But also have a control over our emotions, so when we’re dealing with other emotional creatures who might be difficult, we don’t lose control ourselves and we can influence these people in a positive direction. Any tactics Dale recommended on controlling our emotions?

Joe Hart: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s such an important question and I really appreciate the way you framed it. Let’s talk about other people first. Because the whole first set of principles, the first 30 principles that come from How to Win Friends and Influence People are based on the idea that we’re interacting with another person, and we just have to recognize, we may think in our minds, “Well, this person is thinking logically, so if I’ve given appreciation to this person, I think I’ve respected someone, I’ve treated them a certain way.”

But they’re not necessarily thinking that way, there may be an emotional component to them. They may be perceiving something just to based on how you said something, how you looked or whatever the case might be. So his point is, first of all, let’s be aware of the fact that when we’re interacting with other people that they are creatures of emotion.

They may be angry or upset or petty or whatever it is, and we have to take those things into consideration when we’re acting or interacting with other people. So if I am a boss, so to speak, or a supervisor, and I’ve got someone I’m dealing with, I’m gonna think first about our principal number one, which is don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

There are ways that I can approach something with someone, that does mean I’m not gonna give feedback, and it doesn’t mean I’m not gonna confront an issue, but it does mean that the person may act defensively if the first thing I come in and say, “Brett, you screwed up again. You know, I mean, how many times are we gonna have this conversation, Brett?”

So recognizing the emotional component, and instead he might say something like, look, begin in a friendly way. Which is, “Okay, what can I appreciate about Brett?” If I think Brett is really trying to do a good job and he’s made a mistake, let’s focus on what he’s done right first. Let’s acknowledge some of those good things.

So I’m thinking about this emotional component about how someone’s gonna react emotionally, you can say almost anything if you say it the right way. But just recognize we’re not computers, we’re not just passing information back and forth, there’s this emotional component to it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and I think if you have a better control of your emotions, let’s say someone does something that just first response, it irritates you. Talk about your kid, your kid does something. And your immediate response is lashing out. Dale would say, “Well, how’s that working out for you? Does that make it better? Probably not.” And so Dale would say, “Well, you need to get a better control of your own emotions so that when you interact with others, it’s more successful.”

Joe Hart: That’s right. And in fact, it’s funny because some of these principles that he talks about in How to Win Friends and Influence People, I mean, these are easy in the abstract, but they’re hard in practice. They do require us to get in control of our own emotions so that we can effectively interact with somebody else.

Using the example you just gave of a child who’s done something wrong, if you come in with guns blazing, you’re gonna get one result, but part of when Dale talks about leadership and being a leader, he says, “Begin with praise and honest appreciation.” That’s hard when we’re frustrated.

If I’m frustrated with someone and I’m gonna start with praise and honest appreciation, but it needs to be sincere. And if I do that, that person who’s on the other end of that is gonna respond hopefully in a much more constructive and positive way, than if I just kinda come in and start to put them on the defensive.

Calling attention to people’s mistakes indirectly versus coming out and just… We talk also about this idea of learning the other person save face. At the emotional level, we all wanna be appreciated and respected, and if we feel like those principles are being violated, we’re gonna be defensive, we might be resentful, we might be angry. We could probably all remember experiences that we’ve had with someone who just attacked us and criticized us. Years later it bothers us.

Brett McKay: So gives some ideas on how you can get better control of your emotions, and it’s really just comes down to being mindful of them. Noticing them, asking questions like, “Why am I feeling this way?” labeling it, and that can go a long way to harnessing your emotions for positive ends.

We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. I wanna delve deeper into How To Win Friends and Influence People, aspect of your book. We’ve been talking about different practices that Dale recommended. I wanna drill deeper into these. But correct me if I’m wrong. I think the big insight that Dale Carnegie had in How to Win Friends and Influence People, is that in order to have success with other people, like you were saying earlier, you have to understand these are individuals with their own desires, needs, emotions.

And the key to success in managing or working with other people is getting inside of their own head and trying to really figure out what they’re thinking, feeling, etcetera.

Joe Hart: That’s exactly right. If there’s one kind of overriding principle, and I was thinking about this prior to our interview, from How to Win Friends and Influence People, and it’s not necessarily spoken in this way by Dale, but it is that it’s not about you. We tend to think about things purely from our own point of view. But part of what he’s saying is think about the other person.

And this also goes to public speaking, if you’ve got an audience. Think about the audience, what does the audience need to hear? What is the audience feeling? And how do I interact with that audience? One of the most important principles Dale talks about is Principle 17, try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.

And really think about how polarized our world is, Brett, today. How often do we really just take a step back and say, “I really wanna see how Brett’s seeing this. I’m gonna ask him questions. I’m not gonna attack, I just really wanna understand.” And from a personal standpoint, to give honest, and sincere appreciation, or to try to become genuinely interested in the people.

Dale had said something, I may not be quoting this exactly right, but, “You can gain more friends in two months by becoming interested in them, versus two years of trying to get them interested in you.” So the idea is we think about the other person, we honor the other person, we respect the other person, and that’s also something that builds relationship, which is a goal that we all have our lives.

So much of our lives are around strong connections, whether it’s people with whom we work, whether it’s our family members or friends, sometimes we deal with difficult people around us. So being really skilled at interacting with other people is super important, not just practically from a work standpoint or so forth, but also just from a life satisfaction standpoint.

So much of our happiness comes down to the quality of our relationships. And so much of this then comes down to, it kinda goes back to what you’re saying here, putting myself, maybe I wanna say checking myself, and really focusing on that other person.

Brett McKay: Well, I think another… You keyed in on another big takeaway that I took from How to Win Friends and Influence People. So first one is, if you wanna really have success with people, you need to mentalize, that is get inside their head and try to figure out how they’re seeing things or feeling things.

But the other second principle is if you wanna win friends and influence people, and you said this, you gotta make people feel important. And I think this is a key insight into human nature that Carnegie unearthed in this book, and in fact he quotes several prominent thinkers through the ages who talk about humans’ need for recognition.

He said John Dewey said, “The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.” William James, the father of psychology said, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” And then there’s this other insight from Craig Groeschel, he is a pastor here of a big church in Oklahoma, but he’s got a leadership podcast, and he has this thing that he says that really sticks with me, I think about it a lot, he says that, “The thing that people crave the most is to be noticed and needed.”

And I think Dale really, he mined that, he saw this is really important, if you wanna really have influence over people, you need to help them feel important, and then the rest of the principles in How to Win Friends and Influence People are designed to help you do just that.

Joe Hart: They are. That’s really well put. And that quote that you had about the craving to be appreciated, it’s something that was so important to him, he said it multiple times in How to Win Friends, that people have this. And think about the word “craving”, you could use a different word, but every single person, we all have this deep desire to be appreciated, to be respected, to be valued.

And even if we think about in a workplace, what’s one of the main reasons that people leave jobs, it’s because they don’t feel appreciated. What’s one of the main reasons people leave marriages is because they don’t feel valued and appreciated. So the principles…

And this is why the Dale Carnegie program is so life-changing for so many people who really internalize and live these… I wanna say too, this is not… These are not just techniques. AS Dale would say, it’s a way of living, it’s a way of treating people, it’s a way of honoring people so that you can make them feel important so that you can be honest and sincere, so you can build strong relationships, so you can have a happier life.

But one of the huge outputs we see with Dale Carnegie programs, and one of the main reasons, by the way, that we wrote Take Command, because we wanted to write a book that would take Dale Carnegie principles and ideas, all the ones we’re talking abou, and get them to a younger audience, say, 18 or 20, to 45, 50-year-old audience, people who may not be familiar with, as you are or I am, Brett, How to Win Friends or How to Stop Worrying.

But the truisms, the things that Dale talked about 85 years ago, are every bit as true today as they were then. What is different? The world is different, as you said, technology is different, the way we interact is different, but that craving to be appreciated, that desire to be respected and valued is true.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I would say that I think a lot of people are really craving that today in the 21st Century. ‘Cause our world had become more atomized, it’s hyper-individualistic, people don’t belong to small groups where they might have gotten that healthy attention and appreciation before.

Joe Hart: So I think a lot of people, you’d be surprised at how, what a compliment would do for somebody at work. ‘Cause oftentimes these big, you work, you’re at an office and you’re one of maybe thousands, and you can feel just like an anonymous drone. And if you just have one person say, “Hey, I really appreciate what you did with this X thing,” you can make that person’s day or week.

Completely. And it’s funny because We underestimate sometimes the power and the impact of our words, but that person in the example you gave might go home and just be on a completely, a cloud nine, so to speak, but talking about it and remembering that. And it can also, they can build on it. When we’re recognized for things, we wanna continue to improve on those things.

So it’s one of the things that Dale had talked about, was you praise the slightest improvement, praise every improvement. If we have a child that’s learning to walk, we don’t criticize the child when they fall down. You say, “Hey that’s great. Keep on going. You could do it, you’re gonna get it.”

And we can do the same kinds of things in terms of our interaction with other people, and when we give people… And he’s very careful about the words he uses, he’s says, “Honest and sincere appreciation.” It’s not just… It’s not flattery, it’s not fake, it’s gotta be what comes from your heart.

If I’m gonna give you a compliment, Brett, for that compliment to be honest and sincere, versus something that’s just passing. That’s something that can have a huge impact on people, as you correctly said, for short-term and long-term as well.

Brett McKay: I think that’s a good point you made. I think someone could read How to Win Friends and Influence People and see these list of suggestions or tactics and just see them just as tactics. And say, “I can use this to manipulate people to get what I want.” And Dale would say, “No. If you’re doing that, then you’re missing the whole point. There has to be an underlying sincerity for this to really work in the long-term.”

I think some of these things could work in the short term, but in the long term if you don’t have that sincerity, it’s gonna wind up biting you on the butt.

Joe Hart: No question, you’re actually right. And he spoke to that directly because I think even at the time he published How to Win Friends, people might say that. He was accused of these things, “Oh these things manipulations.” And he was very clear, this is about the way you live, the way you treat people. It’s about treating people the right way. And if you are simply…

If you’re simply using these kinds of ideas in a manipulative way, people see that, they can tell when they’re being flattered. And that’s certainly not what his intention was. His intention was really to help people build better relationships and really discover things in themselves.

It’s interesting because there’s a great thing he says in the beginning of How To Win Friends, which is the sole purpose of this book is to help you discover, develop and profit by, he says, “These dormant and unused assets.” So in the prior part of the book is Professor William James, who you mentioned I think earlier, had said, “Compared to what we ought to, we’re only half awake. We’re making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources.”

So we possess so much more capability than we even know, and these approaches are things that can help us unlock that. Unlock our confidence, unlock our relationships with other people, our abilities.

Brett McKay: So what are some day-to-day things that people can do to show appreciation to other people?

Joe Hart: What I would say is, start even small. Sometimes, especially it’s the beginning of the year and people often have a whole range of goals and things that they wanna do, but one thing we do in our Dale Carnegie programs, we might say, pick one person in your life, an important person in your life. It could be at home, it could be at work, it could be whatever, but someone who’s important in your life that you need to have a better relationship with.

In practice, one principle, apply one principle from How to Win Friends and Influence People, and usually from maybe the first say, nine chapters, because those are really about that initial how you start developing a better relationship with people. So you might say, “Look, I’m going to give honest and since appreciation to so and so.”

So go do that today, one thing today, and see what happens. Or maybe you start to make that a habit. You say… What I used to do when I took this program was I would apply one principle every day for a week. I would just practice and say, “Alright, this week, I’m gonna focus on… ” And it was hard, and I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m still not very good at it. Is don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

Because exactly like you said earlier, we don’t wanna be around people who are just negative and complaining and down all the time. It’s like this is contagious. So I might say, “What could I do?” I could say, “Today for one day, or this week, I’m really gonna pay attention to the words that are coming out of my mouth, to make sure I’m not gonna criticize, condemn or complain.”

And maybe not just out of my mouth, maybe it’s the things I type on social media or the comments I make or whatnot. But if someone said, “I’m gonna have an awareness of how I am presenting in the world, what energy and what I’m putting out there,” that could be something.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about something that Dale talked about and you also talk about in Take Command, is a lot of these principles of giving appreciation to other people and making them feel important, it’s easy when you like the person, it’s hard when the person is, you don’t like them. They’re difficult.

What insights from Dale Carnegie can we glean on to help people feel important and appreciated when, boy, it’s really, that’s like the last thing you wanna do?

Joe Hart: Yeah, and that’s real life. There are people that when we think about them or see them, we might be like, “Oh gosh. I know this is not gonna be a good interaction.” But part of what I would say Dale would start at is, number one, he had a great quote. He quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson is someone who said, “Every person I meet is my superior in some way, in that I learn from them.”

So he might even take somebody that is not a favorite person and say, “Well, what could I learn from this person?” Or allow that person to talk and to listen. Even if you don’t like what they are gonna say, but just go through the exercise of going back to trying to see things in their point of view.

I think Dale’s perspective was that in most cases you’re gonna find something. If you put your own guard down and you try to focus on that person, you’re gonna find something redeeming. And if you do, that can be the beginning of something you build on. Now, one of the things we talked about in Take Command, we have a chapter on dealing with difficult people, and part of the reality is that we need to have boundaries for how we’re gonna let people treat us, and do we communicate those boundaries?

Sometimes, let me give an example, let’s just say that I have a boss who gives me a project and I’m like, “Oh gosh, here he comes again. He’s gonna give me too much,” and so forth. Okay, but have you let the boss know that you’re overwhelmed? Have you had a conversation about if you take this on, the impact it’s gonna have on something else? Sometimes we don’t say anything, don’t even open our mouths.

So when we are dealing with those difficult people, we might also start with a, “What are my boundaries? And have I communicated my boundaries?” Often we make assumptions about what people are thinking about us or what they’re gonna do, when in fact it’s our assumptions that are the problem. Sometimes we’re the problem because we’re blaming other people, but we ourselves might have an impact on improving that relationship.

Brett McKay: I think that’s a good point. I think a lot of people struggle with that, or at least I struggle with that, the boundary thing. And the problem that I have is I don’t communicate them to other people, and I just assume, “Well, you should just know. You should just know that this is unacceptable.”

They don’t know, they don’t know. And you go back to Dell Carnegie, he would say, “Brett, that’s a completely different person, they have no clue what you’re thinking. In order for that to happen, you have to communicate your boundaries.”

Joe Hart: Absolutely right. And give people the benefit of the doubt. At least in the beginning. Certainly it is rumored, and I don’t know if this is true, Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends has 30 principles, and it’s rumored that he had considered a 31st principle, which is that, “If none of these principles work, kick them in the shins and leave.” [chuckle]

But that never made the book so I guess it’s kind of just maybe more of a story. But I think he would say, “You really try to work with people and you think about how you can work with people.” And in some cases if it’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna work. But you do everything you can to give people the benefit of the doubt and try to build the best relationship you can.

But there are some situations where you need to break the relationship, where you shouldn’t be around someone who’s gonna be persistently negative or someone who is just gonna bring you down, or someone who’s acting in a way that violates your values or your principles. So there is a place for that too.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you gotta kick ’em in the shins.

Joe Hart: So to speak.

Brett McKay: So to speak. Yeah, I think that’s a good point, give people the benefit of the doubt. Whenever I’ve done that it seems to go better. Every now and then you get burned. But I think it’s the price you gotta pay for just having a good trustworthy society. Let’s talk about this third section, which is about developing a vision for your life.

I’m curious, how did this come out of Dale Carnegie’s work? Or is this something that developed after How to Win Friends and Influence People, and How to Stop Worrying were written?

Joe Hart: So this third part of the book is really comes from the Dale Carnegie course. So just to take it one step back, and I think you’ve done a great job of touching on this, the first part of Take Command is take command of your thoughts and emotions. So if you… You can’t do anything if you can’t take command of yourself first.

How do you deal with stress and worry, how do you deal with negativity or negative thoughts and so forth, you build in yourself that resilience. And so that comes from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, and then we’ve built on that. The second part, How to Win Friends… It comes from How to Win Friends and Influence People, is take command of your relationships. All the wisdom of Dale Carnegie we’ve synthesized and built on in that second part.

So this third part, which goes to your question about where did this come from, is take command of your future. What’s your vision for yourself? Are you living an intentional life? And so in the Dale Carnegie course, and these are our courses that come, you could take a three-day Dale Carnegie course, an eight-week or 12 week, there’s different versions of this, but they all focus on this idea of being intentional, of taking risk.

Of sometimes, and I don’t know about you, Brett, I’ve certainly had the occasion where say you get on social media and you find yourself scrolling, you’re scrolling, and next thing you know an hour’s gone by, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, where’d the time go?” And if that’s what you wanted to do, that’s fine.

But our lives can often get caught up in these unintentional activities, and so days go by or you get caught up with to-do lists and so forth, days and weeks and months, and all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh my gosh. Years have gone by.” So in the Dale Carnegie course we focus on… In part three of Take Command we focus on what’s important to you, Brett?

What’s important to you? Is it your family? Is it your friends? Is it your future? Is your faith? Is it your fitness? What is it? But what’s the future like that you want for yourself, and then what are the things you need to do to kinda go in that direction. Because at the end of the day, if someone’s reading Take Command, we want them to be able to live the life that they want. And you can’t do that if you don’t know what kind of life you want. So that’s a lot of where that came from.

Brett McKay: So the first part is just developing a vision for your life, and there’s some… You offer some great questions of reflection that people can ask themselves, practices of developing maybe a vision statement that’s gonna guide all the big decisions you make, and I love how you laid it out in the book.

And then also talk about making sure you develop a life of meaning. I think oftentimes when people think about self-improvement they’re thinking about, “How can I advance my career? How to make more money? How can I get more fit?” But what you do in that last chapter is talking about, well, that’s all fine and good, but don’t forget to develop a life of meaning, and that often comes through serving others.

Joe Hart: That’s right. So often we can be, especially when we’re younger, very self-focused. And understandably so, we’re focused on our careers and getting established and so forth. But if we talk to people who are at the end of their lives and they’re reflecting on their lives and so many surveys have talked about this, people will often regret things that they didn’t do, or relationships that they didn’t repair, or just they maybe thought that they would have had more of an impact.

We think it’s very important to think about how do you wanna be remembered? What impact can you have? And it doesn’t have to be… We certainly have some stories and some examples of people who had massive impact, someone who is just so upset about the oceans that she starts the largest sustainable ocean alliance in the world.

So there are those kinds of things certainly, but then we also have stories about people… I tell a story about my father, who was a recovering alcoholic who spent 51 years without a drink, who touched people around him and encouraged them to stay sober. So we can have impacts.

You as a father, you were talking about your son and wanting your son to be successful and thriving as he gets older, and you’re working with him. That’s impact. But it starts with you saying, “This is how I wanna spend my time.” You’re not spending your time at that particular point doing something else, you’re making time for your son.

And this part of the book is really an important section to get to what’s important to you? Take some time and think about what are your values? Who are the people? What’s the vision you want for yourself? What’s the impact you wanna have?

Brett McKay: We’ve had David Brooks on the podcast talk about The Second Mountain, and it’s an idea that’s really had a big impact on the way I think about my life trajectory. He has this idea, there’s two mountains, and I think Richard Rohr, who’s a Franciscan monk, has this idea as well, it’s where David Brooks got it from.

The first amount of life is our typical, what we typically think of success goals, getting a career, going to college, getting fit, and then he says there’s this second mountain that we’ll have to summit in life, and that’s about… It’s not about the opportunities of the first mountain, it’s about rejecting them and looking for more of a life of meaning.

And that could look different for different people. It could be you spend time doing community service with children or a sports team, or it could be you’re a grandfather and you’re gonna spend more time with your grandkids. The second mountain usually chooses you, I think.

Joe Hart: That’s right. And often it’s based on your situation. It does choose you, I think it also connects to your values though, so in other words there’s that saying that, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” And I think that’s true a little bit about legacy, when there are certain things that are important to us, certain things that connect to our meaning, and we might as we look around, see things that connect to those.

And that’s great, so go toward those things. Whether it’s as you said, it could be your family or it could be people around you at work. It could be something larger or some sort of a legacy kind of a thing. But the reality is that we are in a life right now, and this is the life that we have.

As I said in the book my dad always just to say, “No one gets out alive.” And every day that we have, and again I say this not in a macabre or negative way, in a way to cherish the value of every single day, but every day that you have is one less day that you have left, so we’ve gotta really make those days count.

And this goes back to even to mindset, if we’ve got the right mindset, boy, we can see opportunity all around us, we can see wonderful things and gifts and just great things around us, if we have our minds open to that.

Brett McKay: Well, Joe, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go and learn more about the book and your work?

Joe Hart: The first place I’d say is dalecarnegie.com, that is really all about our Dale Carnegie organization. Also, there’s a site which is takecommand.com. They can also go to takecommandbook.io, which will take them directly to Amazon to buy the book if they wanna do that. I’m also very active on LinkedIn and Twitter, with the handle of Joseph K. Hart, so people can follow me certainly, and I’ll continue to share insights and experiences and things as I go along my way.

Brett McKay: But yeah, those are all different things. And if people… My hope would be too, I hope that people have the mindset of wanting to get better. I’m assuming Brett, that because they’re listening to your podcast and you’ve got a phenomenal podcast and site and organization that you lead, that they are interested in self-improvement.

Joe Hart: The single most valuable thing I’ve ever done for my self-improvement was to take a Dale Carnegie course, so I would certainly encourage people who are open to that to do that. But reading How To Win Friends, reading How to Stop Worrying, reading Take Command, those are things also that can help people on their journey.

And that’s really our hope, our hope is to have an impact. That was Dale’s hope. Dale really cared about people and helping people live the life that they wanted to lead.

Brett McKay: Well, Joe Hart. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joe Hart: Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest there was Joe Hart. He’s the co-author of the book, Take Command. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about Dale Carnegie & Associates at dalecarnegie.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/carnegie, where you find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast, make sure check on our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “manliness” at check out for a free month trial.

Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think can get something out of it.

As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

• AoM Article: The 10 Commandments of Clean Communication
• AoM Article: How to Communicate Your Needs in a Relationship
• AoM Article: Can Men and Women Just Be Friends?
• AoM Podcast #179: The Science of Cheating — How to Prevent and Deal With Infidelity
• AoM Podcast #550: How to Strengthen Your Marriage Against Divorce
• Sunday Firesides: Dependence to Independence
• Sunday Firesides: Give Them the Cream

Connect With Andrew G. Marshall

• Andrew’s website with links to his books and his podcast, The Meaningful Life
• Andrew on Twitter
• Andrew on Facebook
• Andrew on Substack

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast Sponsors

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Among supposedly monogamous couples, 23% of men and 19% of women have cheated on their current partner. And while studies have long found that men are more likely to cheat than women, that gap has significantly narrowed over time. In fact, married women between the ages of 18 and 29 cheat at a slightly higher rate than men do. Behind cold bits of data like this are the many real stories of infidelity, and the heartache and destruction they create. If you’re not yet part of the cohort who’s experienced the fallout of cheating firsthand, you probably want to avoid joining its ranks. Well, my guest has a formula that explains what three factors add up to infidelity. And once you know it, you can reverse engineer things to prevent those factors from showing up in your relationship. His name is Andrew G. Marshall. He’s a marriage therapist with over 30 years of counseling experience. Today on the show, Andrew first shares the breakdown in age and gender amongst the clients who come to see him in his practice and the two stages of life where he’s found infidelity to be the most common.

Andrew shares his formula for what leads to infidelity. And as we unpack its elements, we discuss how quiet desperation is a major driver of cheating, why men who don’t have good male friends are more likely to have an affair, how to know if you’re forming an inappropriate friendship that could lead to infidelity, Andrew’s seven deadly sins of bad communication, and more. We also talk about the practices that healthy couples use to ward off infidelity and the best question to ask yourself to start improving your relationship today. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/infidelityformula.

Alright. Andrew G. Marshall, welcome to the show.

Andrew G. Marshall: It’s a great pleasure to be here.

Brett McKay: So you’re a marriage counselor and you’ve written several books on infidelity. I’m curious, based on your experience as a marriage counselor, how many of the couples that you work with come to you because they’re dealing with the fallout of an affair?

Andrew G. Marshall: Well, I’ve been doing this for 35 years and infidelity’s changed a lot. Basically, my clients used to fall into two categories. About 50% of them were coming because one partner had said, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” And then the other half came because of affairs. More recently, I’ve moved to Germany, and here in Berlin I’m getting a slightly different cross section of people. And I’m getting younger people, as well, ’cause it’s a much younger city than London, where I used to work. And often it’s about how to communicate better. So it’s almost like stages you go through. If you don’t actually resolve better communication, one person tends to fall out of love. And if you don’t solve the fact that one person has fallen out of love, generally the relationship becomes much, much more vulnerable to an affair.

Brett McKay: I’d like to flush that out more because I think you have this formula that you’ve developed about what leads to an affair. But before we get more into the specifics, what do you think is at the root of the prevalence of infidelity, in general?

Andrew G. Marshall: I think we take love for granted. We feel that when we fall in love it’s like sort of entering into a new building. And once you’re in that building, only if it burns down will you come out of it. But we sort of know very little about love. We don’t want to look at it too much because we’re frightened that we might spoil the magic. And with that special connection, the sacred connection almost, we think we’ve got all what we need. But we need to put the work in. We need skills. We need to know how to communicate effectively. And we need to know the things that kills love. And the first and most important one is that we put our work over everything else. This one’s a controversial one, but we put our children before our relationship. We think the children should come first, but no, the children sit in the success of the relationship. So you need to put the relationship first to really look after your children. And we sort of put our phones before our partners. How many times you’ve been in a restaurant and there’s a couple and they’re both sitting there looking at their phones.

So we don’t know the skills, and we sort of take love for granted. Oh, and on our phones, there’s a thousand and one ways of connecting with somebody else without our partner knowing. I mean, when I first started, if you wanted to have an affair, you used to have to phone people from phone boxes. You know, nobody had a personal telephone. If you wanted to write to them, you’d have to put a note through their door. Now, all the time you’re getting thousands of messages. It could be from your bank. It could be from your lover.

Brett McKay: Okay. So infidelity is very common because people just assume when they get married that that’s it. They’re done. They’ve done it. They’re set. Let’s talk about this. Like, are there differences between men and women when it comes to infidelity?

Andrew G. Marshall: Well, traditionally men are looking for sex and women are looking for love. And that’s a lot to do with how both men and women are actually socialized differently. But actually underneath it, we’re looking for the same thing. We want to feel alive. We want to feel connected to our partner.

Brett McKay: So there’s no difference. I mean, in your practice, was a male more likely to commit adultery, same as a woman?

Andrew G. Marshall: Well, when people try and ask, do more men cheat than women, you have to remember who are these people cheating with? The vast majority of men cheat with women.

So, and most of the time it’s another couple. So effectively there are two relationships in crisis. Yes, there are single women who will have a short term dalliance sometimes with a married man, but generally single women have actually realized that it’s a bit of a dead end. And so most of them are not that stupid. Generally people have affairs out of desperation. And generally you’ve got a desperate wife and a desperate husband. They just belong to different people.

Brett McKay: I thought that one of these in your books you highlight case studies from your practice. And, of course, you changed the names and everything. But I was surprised the number of affairs that happened between couple friends, right? So it’s like the husband had an affair with the best friend of his wife who’s also married.

Andrew G. Marshall:Yes, that’s incredibly common. And I think that what’s the difference between men and women that is actually really interesting is that women, when they’re feeling that their relationship is in a very dark place, generally are more likely to say, “I’ve had enough.” And we know from statistics, it’s far more women who initiate divorce than men. But men, because they are more likely to outsource their emotions to a woman, are likely to line up another woman before they leave. So if a man is going to end a relationship, unfortunately more times than not, there’s either a woman who actually he’s having an affair with or what sometimes people call overlap of relationships. So he has effectively left the relationship. He just hasn’t told his wife. So they tend to line somebody up, whereas women generally tend to say, “I’ve had enough. I’m going to have some time to reassess. See what I want before starting on another relationship.” So often when a woman ends a relationship, it’s sort of much tidier than the way the man ends it. And that generally makes for a better relationship the next time around.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about this. Is there an age when people are more likely to have an affair?

Andrew G. Marshall: I think that… And ending up seeing a marriage counselor tend to be two particular phases. It’s when you have, lets see, very small children and when your children are teenagers. And why are those the two particularly dangerous times? When you’ve got a woman after she’s given birth, all of her hormones goes into bonding with the child. It generally takes about 18 months for that to return to normal. And what is the age difference most people have between their children? About two years. So almost as soon as their hormones are back together, in a normal kind of way, then they’ve got the second child. And during this time, women are available for sex, but they’re not going to feel spontaneously horny. They’ve actually got to be wooed and persuaded to make love.

At this point, a lot of men feel that their wives are not interested in them anymore. It’s not that they’re not interested, they just don’t know how to recruit them. So two children under five is an incredibly difficult time for people’s sex lives, and that can lead to an affair. And the next time is when the children are teenagers. Because it sort of reminds the parents, unconsciously, of the fact that they’re getting old. They’re feeling less vibrant. They’re heading towards midlife and the changes that come there. And instead of actually dealing with those, instead of answering the difficult questions like, “Who am I? What do I want to do with the rest of my life?” They answer an easy question. And an easy question is, “Do I fancy the woman sitting next to me at work?” And they tend to have affairs at that point, as well.

Brett McKay: So the teenage years, you’re going to be probably late 40s, early 50s, likely?

Andrew G. Marshall: Yeah. That’s the sweet spot for an affair. Or a sweet spot for a really serious affair.

Brett McKay: Okay. So there’s two points in your life saying where you’re most susceptible to an affair. Right after the kids are born. And then, when they become teenagers. Let’s talk about this, in your work and with dealing with people who are dealing with affairs. You’ve developed this formula for what caused an affair. What is that formula?

Andrew G. Marshall: It’s problem plus poor communication plus temptation equals an affair. And the problem is often an individual problem. Sometimes it might be something that you’re very aware of like you’ve had a knock in your confidence from losing a job. It could be something that actually you’re unconscious of. And is actually beginning to sort of build up, unknown to you. So for example, your father left when you were eight or nine years old. And when your own children get to that age it unconsciously brings back all of those kinds of issues of abandonment and pain. And rather than actually being aware of those feelings coming up and actually thinking about doing something about them, that unconsciously you are going to do exactly what your father did. So the problems can be personal and they can be conscious and unconscious. Could also be relationship problems. It could be that there are unresolved issues in the couple, they can’t talk about money, for example. I mean, that it can be a shared problem, but often it’s an individual problem. Or in fact, actually, both people have problems that aren’t actually being dealt with, and they’re turning up in nasty fights between the two of them.

If you have a problem and you and your partner can talk about it, then it’s going to be resolved. If for example, the problem is you have a dull or non-existent sex life, if you had good communication you could actually say, “You know what, honey. I’m a little unhappy about our sex life. How are you feeling about it? Would you like it to be better?” And then you could sort of possibly do something about it. But if you can’t communicate, all of this problems go underground. And then you’ve just got to have a little bit of temptation coming along and you’ve got an affair.

Brett McKay: In your practice, what have been the most common problems at the root of most affairs?

Andrew G. Marshall: Well, I think you’re going to like this answer because I know you’re a Thoreau fan. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” And the mass of women lead lives of quiet desperation. And what is often called resignation is confirmed desperation. So you know, what is this quiet desperation? We sort of don’t… We feel that we’re not being seen. We feel that we’re not attractive. We sometimes actually feel that we’re not truly alive. We might be angry or we feel controlled. You know, these are the sort of surface kind of things, but somehow deep inside us, there’s a feeling of deadness. And instead of actually thinking, why am I feeling dead? And the answers might be spiritual, it might be professional, it might be all sorts of things. But we look for a connection, and the sort of… Our culture says the answer is love. You know, listen to all the popular songs. Love will build a bridge. Love is the answer. Love will save the day. You know, it’s easy. You find love and all problems magically melt away. So we’ve got quiet desperation, a feeling of deadness, wanting connection. And our society is pushing love as the answer.

Brett McKay: And how do you figure… How does a couple figure that out? Let’s say they’re… Someone’s recognizing I’m on the path to… I’m looking, I’m feeling this quiet desperation and I wanna maybe spice things up. Or maybe they’re in the throes of it and they’re trying to figure out what happened. How do you figure that out, especially when the source of the problem could be hidden or buried?

Andrew G. Marshall: I think you need to look at what have been the most difficult parts of your life. Go back. What sort of relationship did your parents have? What sort of relationships did you have with your parents? What was your very first ever memory? Because sometimes those actually holds the key to what’s going to be issues for us further on. If your first memory is actually of being abandoned, that might actually give you some clues about what’s going on. I think you have to think possibly about getting therapy, talking to somebody. Talk to your friends as well about what they discovered about their marriages. I think this is the big problem that men have. We’re not socialized to ask for help. We don’t actually talk to our friends about anything beyond football and sending jokes. And we might talk about politics, a little bit. But you don’t actually talk openly and honestly about your relationship. Women talk about these things all the time. They learn from each other. The number of women who contact me for help versus the number of men that contact me for help, it’s like 80% of people who speak to me are women only 20% are men. So get more friends.

I think that’s always my advice to men, get more friends. Start talking to your friends in a different kind of way. I had a male client who was going through a sort of midlife crisis. And he was going back to, I think it was his 20th, 25th anniversary of college breaking up. And I said, “At this reunion, will you tell your friends from college days that you’re actually having… You’ve got a therapist and you’re looking into, why have I got a life of quiet desperation?” And he said, “Hmm. That’s an interesting idea. Maybe I will.” And do you know what happened?

Brett McKay: What happened?

Andrew G. Marshall: Well, every last one of his friends, bar one, were also in therapy, as well. The one person who wasn’t in therapy, they all agreed, should have been in therapy. But it takes one person to say it and then suddenly everybody’s saying it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This idea about male friendship. I thought that was interesting. You made this… You’ve noted in your practice, you’ve made an observation that men who don’t have a solid group of male friends are more likely to have an affair than men who have good male friendships. And that’s just because they’ve got someone to talk to?

Andrew G. Marshall: Yeah, because if you start talking to somebody about emotions, you get closer to them. If it’s your male buddy, that is absolutely wonderful. If it’s the woman sitting next to you at work, that can be incredibly dangerous. Because, I’ve said this before, and I think it’s worth saying again, “Men outsource their emotional welfare to women.” When they’re young, it’s their mother, then it’s their girlfriend, then it’s their wife. Now, what do you do if you’ve got problems with your wife?

Brett McKay: Right. And then you find an office wife. It’s basically a coworker and you… No. First it’s just sort of like you keep it professional. But then you’re like, well, you come in and you’re looking like dejected and she’s like, “What’s going on?” It’s like, “Well…,” and then you start unloading the problems and that’s when things can go awry.

Andrew G. Marshall: Yep. Or she’s unloading her problems and you can become the knight in shining armor and rescue her from it. And then you immediately feel brilliant so that you are the savior. It’s the same dynamic. It’s just the opposite way around.

Brett McKay: Well, and similar to this idea of… And the importance of having male friendships so you can talk to your… If you’re having marital problems, you can talk to them instead of confiding into a woman who could be potentially an affair partner. You have this idea about inappropriate friendships. And this has become… This is something that’s harder in this day and age. And if you ask this question 150 years ago, most people, they had a homo-social relationships, right? Just men were friends with men, women were friends… There’s like two separate domains. But now, men and women can be friends, but sometimes…

Andrew G. Marshall: Which is wonderful.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Which is great. But sometimes those friendship can become inappropriate. How do you define an inappropriate friendship?

Andrew G. Marshall: Well, an inappropriate friendship is one that you can’t actually have in the full daylight. If you’re off and you’re going to watch rugby together, that’s very English. Example, if you’re going off to watch sport together, that’s perfectly acceptable. And if anybody else wanted to come along, that would be fine. The minute you actually have to start lying about where you’ve been, you’ve been to lunch together for the 15th time at work with another woman, the minutes that nobody can actually look in on this event, the minute you are actually crossing over between, ” I saw X today and we had lunch together and we talked about Y,” if you can’t have that conversation, you are actually lying to yourself. Most people who end up having affairs are lying to themselves about actually how serious it’s getting. They sort of tell themselves things like, “Oh, we’re just friends.” But they actually know that it’s more than that. Once you’re actually lying about what you’re doing, you are in a danger zone. You are having an inappropriate friendship. If you can’t invite them home to the family barbecue, they’re inappropriate friends.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So there’s always a problem at the start of an affair. And usually it’s this quiet desperation. People just don’t feel alive. They don’t feel appreciated. They don’t feel loved. And because they can’t communicate with their spouse, they’ll go to someone else. And for men, that’s usually another woman because they don’t have good male friendships or they don’t feel like they can talk about their problems with their buds. But let’s talk about this communication aspect between a couple. What is the communication problem? Is it like they’re just not talking at all or is it they just kind of snip at each other? What is stopping people typically from talking about these problems?

Andrew G. Marshall: Okay. I’ve got seven deadly sins of bad communication. So count up how many of these you do, Brett. “I’m right and you’re wrong.” I mean, I can’t tell you how many hours couples can argue this one about. And I’ve just reached the point where I was saying, we’re just having another game of I’m right and you’re wrong. You’re never ever going to win this. So let’s stop. Number two, trying to control your partner. It’s not trying to get them to do this or that, but it’s the sort of, “I’ll be okay if you do X, Y, Z. So if you give me more sex, I’ll be okay, or if you don’t keep on and on and about that problem, I’ll be okay.” You’re trying to get your partner to behave in a particular way. The next one, and this is one that is less likely to happen but from men than from women, this is called unbridled self-expression. So what do I mean by that? I had a female client who said to me, “But I should be able to tell my husband how I feel.” And of course, she should be able to, but not at any time in the same way that it’s like men saying, “Well, we’re married I have the right to have sexual intercourse.”

Women think they have the right to unload their feelings, but you have to ask for sex. You have to check that your partner is in the right mood. You have to woo them to get them into the right mood. And with unbridled self-expression, you’re just dumping your feelings. You’re not saying, “Can we talk? Is this a good time?” It’s just bleh. Obviously, we’ve got the opposite one, which is the one that men tend to do a lot, which is called shutting down. And this might be leaving the room. It might be mentally switching off. It might be stonewalling, but you are shutting down the communication. This is a really horrible one, but people retaliate. You did this and therefore I’m going to do that. One I see a lot is judging and then you analyze your partner and tell them what they’re doing wrong. And I promise you telling your partner what they’re doing wrong is not going to get them to say, “Oh yes, you’re right.” They tend to get defensive and then you go on the attack and you can see we’re back into I’m right and you’re wrong.

And the final one of the seven deadly sins is making assumptions. My wife doesn’t want to have sex with me because she doesn’t love me anymore. Well, it might be that you’re asking for it in all the wrong way that’s turning her off. It’s not that she doesn’t want to, it’s just you’re making it incredibly difficult for her to say yes, but that’s an assumption. I’m always getting my clients to… I say, “Stop making assumptions. Turn that into a question.” And I’ll much rather it was an open curious question like, “Why don’t we make love anymore?” But if it has to be, “Do you still fancy me?” That’s much better than the problem is you don’t fancy me.

Brett McKay: And where do these poor communication habits come from? Is this from childhood? Like this is where you grew up, communicating like this and you just bring it to your relationship, your marriage?

Andrew G. Marshall: Well, I think we’ve got several problems. First and foremost, most of our parents were not particularly good at communicating. I came from a family where nothing was ever spoken about. What a surprise I became a marital therapist. Other people have parents that argue like cat and dog or even worse, they argued like cat and dog and then one of them left. So there was actually, they never saw good communication. We’re not taught how to do it at school either. So how are we going to get it? Is it going to be beamed down from space to us?

Brett McKay: No. Yeah. Well, you have to… It’s hard. You have to learn how to do it. And it’s like any other skill.

Andrew G. Marshall: I mean, it is really hard. Somebody tells you that they’re upset and we live in a culture that says, if your partner tells you they’re upset, it’s your job to put it right. But no, you’re not responsible for rescuing your partner. What you are responsible for, and if you can just do this, your life will be transformed is you’ve just got to listen to them. It’s as simple as that. You can reflect back. So you’re saying you’re unhappy because the children are impossible, for example. Tell me more. Tell me more are the three most loving words in the English language, because it’s very easy to say I love you, but when your partner is unhappy and you’re saying, tell me more about it, that’s a really difficult thing to do. Ask them curious questions. “Why do you think our children are so difficult at the moment? What is it? What’s going on, do you think?” You don’t have to come up with a solution, but unfortunately, and I think men are particularly prone to do this, if their wives tell them about a problem, they immediately feel responsible.

And they either try and cut the problem down to size and minimize it, and I promise you that will not be very popular, or they will just throw their hands up and think, “Oh, I can’t do anything,” and they’ll shut down. But all you have to do is listen.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, I think that’s what… As you said, a lot of people, the problems that can lead to an affair, they’re multifaceted, but at the root of it, it’s probably like people just want to feel appreciated and noticed and they’re not getting that in their marriage and so they go somewhere else. They think they’re gonna get it there. And I think I was surprised the number of instances where, yeah, a man left because he felt like he wasn’t getting the sex he wanted in the marriage. But what he talked about was like, “Well, I just feel like I get so much attention from the other woman.” People just want to feel appreciated and noticed.

Andrew G. Marshall: Yeah, and one of the incredibly sad things is often how much attention is going to the children and how little attention people give to their partner. They become co-parents rather than lovers. And that is a recipe for disaster.

Brett McKay: Okay, so there’s a problem. People can’t talk about the problem and that the problem just festers and then along comes the temptation. What are the typical temptations that you’ve seen in your practice?

Andrew G. Marshall: Well, we’ve covered quite a few of them. Somebody tells you you’re wonderful and if at home you’re either being ignored or you’re being told that you are messy and inconsiderate and everything else like that sort of, all the odd desire just sparks up. If you feel that your life is a complete and utter mess, the hardest thing to solve is your own problem. Somebody else’s problems, a piece of cake. So there’s somebody who’s crying at work and the easiest thing to do is to listen to them and feel empowered. And that is incredibly tempting. The alcohol is another temptation, have alcohol and your judgment goes out of the window. Another thing that’s been thrown into the mix over the last 35 years is the amount of street drugs, social drugs that are used, cocaine and various other things. A lot of my clients have problems because they’re going out, they’re drinking a huge amount, they’re taking cocaine as well. They’re coming home at 4 o’clock in the morning, they forget my golden rule. “Nothing good happens after 3 o’clock in the morning. Go home.” Temptation is all around when you get into that situation.

Brett McKay: And how have smartphones changed the game?

Andrew G. Marshall: Oh, [chuckle] well, number one, you’ve got 1001 dating apps. There are millions of women waiting to meet you. They sometimes don’t even wait for you to contact them. There’s women from Russia contacting you to tell you how wonderful you are. That smartphones, on one level, they’ve revolutionized the help and support after infidelity. It’s much easier to get hold of, support and information that, we are powering up in the marital therapy world. But the cheating world is being super powered as well.

Brett McKay: Like what is the role… I guess one thing that’s happened in the past 10 years is like these OnlyFans, where it’s like you can sign up and follow these people because they talk to you, but then they do provocative things. Has that been an issue you’ve seen in your clients?

Andrew G. Marshall: I haven’t had people with Just Fans, but there… I get a lot of people who’ve been to massage parlors and their partners have found out and there’s what’s called a happy ending. And the prostitution that’s very big as well. It’s gone from being 35 years ago, if somebody came to me and they were seeing prostitutes, I would be quite surprised. Now, I just take a deep breath. So I would say that generally infidelity is getting more toxic.

Brett McKay: Well, and another interesting thing you pointed about the smartphones is that it makes having an affair easier, right? Because there’s… You can get access to temptations, it’s all around you 24/7, but then it also makes it easier to discover the affair because you leave behind an electronic paper trail.

Andrew G. Marshall: Yeah. And your wife at the moment might be not at all tech savvy, but I promise you that the FBI has got nothing on a wife who thinks their partner has had an affair. She will find every last message. She will read every last message. When she’s in a dark place, she will reread those. Those words that you casually said, “You’re the most wonderful person in the world” because you thought, well this might help me facilitate a bit of nooky that is going to be brought back as evidence in the cold, hard light of day. I promise you, you will be discovered. Your credit card is leaving messages, your phone, they know where you are every step of the way. Everything will be found out. It is impossible to have an affair without being found out. I have people who discovered 20 years later through various means, and it’s just as devastating if it happened 20 years ago than if it happened 20 minutes ago. You will be found out.

Brett McKay: Okay. So when it comes to an affair, this formula again, it’s problem plus poor communication plus temptation equals fair. So that can, like… What I like about that formula, it gives you different ways you can tackle the issue or to prevent an affair in the first place. One, if there’s a problem, you gotta learn how to talk about it, and focus on improving your communication skills.

Andrew G. Marshall: And I think this is really important for men. You’ve actually got to recognize and own up to it. We live in a world where we are lone wolves. We’ve got to solve it ourselves. And you don’t, you can ask for help. If you are feeling that quiet desperation, look inside and try and find out what it’s about. And if you’re not used to looking inside, get some training on how to look inside, you will find a thousand and… And if therapy isn’t for you, there’ll be 1001 podcasts that will actually get you thinking about your relationship. And as you hear other people talking about their stuff, it will certainly make you begin to think about, “Hmm, yes, that sounds familiar, and will give you a path to start going down.”

Brett McKay: And then the other part of the temptation part, if you are going through a rough patch in your relationship, like be aware of that, and maybe reduce temptations in your life, would that be something to do?

Andrew G. Marshall: Yes. I mean, look at your alcohol consumption for example. If you are in a dark place, don’t go down to slippery places because you will slide straight into a brick wall.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, so we’ve been talking about when marriages go wrong. Let’s talk about best practices in healthy marriages. What are the… What do you see in your experience that help keep the temptation of infidelity at bay? Like what do healthy marriages look like?

Andrew G. Marshall: Well, if you’re in a healthy marriage, rather than saying, my problems are you need to do this, that and the other, the sort of you, you, you, you can almost imagine me pointing my finger. You ask this question and this is the most beautiful question you’re probably gonna hear today. What can I do differently? Because ultimately the only person we can change is ourself. So what could I do differently is a really interesting question because generally if I ask people in unhealthy marriages what they could do differently, they sort of are shocked and they shut up. If I ask them, what could your partner do differently? I have to shut them up because they’re going to go on for the next 40 minutes. We’ve got a huge list of what our partner could do differently, a very small one of what we could do differently.

And then this is probably the core of good communication and I have a saying, and if most of my clients end up being drilled on this one, so I’ll give this one to you for free. I can ask, you can say no and we can communicate. And the problem is a lot of people were never trained to actually ask. They will hint or they will hope. You know, if I do lots of nice things to you, you will somehow guess what it is I want. But to say, “Can we have an early night tonight and it’s just going to be you and I and we’re gonna have a bath and we’re going to relax and we’re gonna have time together.” That can be really hard to ask for because we’re terrified of getting a no. So can you ask, can you say no? And this is quite surprising. A lot of people find it really difficult to say no to their partner.

If they want something, you sort of feel you’ve got to give it to them. And it’s lovely to say yes to your partner, but if you’re saying yes and it’s actually costing you every time. I had a couple where the wife wanted to go to her sister’s every Christmas Eve and the husband wanted to stay home and just have a Christmas eve together, particularly as they would be seeing his sister-in-law and all her family the next day on Christmas day as well when they’ll be coming to their house. And every year it hurt him a little bit more, but he couldn’t actually say no. Guess when this all came out, after he’d had the affair. So can you say no and can you negotiate? Couples don’t know how to negotiate often. They’re actually trying to fight all the time for who is right and who is wrong. Can you negotiate? Can you do a trade, can you find a compromise?

Once again, these are skills we don’t know, but if you’re in a well-functioning marriage, you can ask, your partner can say no, and then you can negotiate. So back to my first request of can we have a night where we’re gonna have a nice early night and a bath and spend time together, you can say, actually no, I’m really tired, but let’s put it in the diary and do it tomorrow. And we’ve got a good piece of communication.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like just learning how to be an adult, basically. Like treat, engage with each other as an adult. ‘Cause I think oftentimes people kind of are in kid mode when they sort of wanting to ask what they want, they just kind of expect people to know what they want. Sort of like a parent knew what you needed, right?

Andrew G. Marshall: Yeah. One of the things that people have discovered post COVID and they’ve actually seen their partner in Zoom meetings, they’ve actually seen, they’re really nice to people at work. They’re just horrible. They bring their worst person back home. Because somebody loves us, they’ve gotta put up with all of our bad behavior and our poor communication and we are tired and we don’t put so much effort into it. So yeah, you’ve gotta show up with your best part of you. Of course, not all the time, but if your partner gets the worst of you, it’s not going to make for a good marriage in the long term.

Brett McKay: Well Andrew, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Andrew G. Marshall: Right, I have a podcast which is called The Meaningful Life with Andrew G. Marshall, which is all about trying to understand what makes life meaningful. And for a lot of people, that’s relationships. And so, we cover relationships a huge amount, but we also cover work and friendship and all sorts of other things. But often the skills for one area are transferable to another area. I have a website, which is www.andrewgmarshall.com, where you’ll find details of my books. And on this one we’ve got, ‘Why Did I Cheat?’ This is for people who’ve been unfaithful. ‘How Can I Ever Trust You Again,’ this is if your partner has cheated. If you’ve got a really serious long term problem, ‘I Can’t Get Over My Partner’s Affair.’ There’s another book that you’ll find interesting, ‘I love you, But I’m Not In Love With You.’ I’m also on Twitter and Facebook. And do you know Substack?

Brett McKay: Yes.

Andrew G. Marshall: I have a Substack account that one’s called The Meaningful Life. And join that and you get a fortnightly newsletter.

Brett McKay: Alright. Well, Andrew G. Marshall, thanks for this time. It’s been a pleasure.

Andrew G. Marshall: It has been a pleasure for me as well, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Andrew G. Marshall. He’s a marriage therapist who’s written several books about marriage and relationships and infidelity, including the book. ‘Why Did I Cheat?’ They’re all available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, andrewgmarshall.com. Also, check out his podcast, The Meaningful Life with Andrew G. Marshall. And check out our show notes at aom.is/infidelityformula, where you’ll find links to resources when you delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website, at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com. Sign up and use code Manliness at checkout for free month trial. Once you’ve signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, you can start, enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.