How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People by Les Giblin Book Review (1956)
How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People is Les Giblin's 1956 human relations manual, first published by Prentice-Hall. Kevin Trudeau recommends it. The case for it is structural. Giblin does not open with rules. He opens with a claim about what people are, then derives the behavior from it. The engine he names is the human hunger to feel important, and every technique in the book feeds it. Read it if you want the reasoning under the technique. Skip it if you want research, because Giblin's evidence is a sales route and a seminar room.
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This How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing With People by Les Giblin book review walks the fourteen chapters, the Triple-A formula, the mirror argument in chapter four, how it differs from Dale Carnegie, which Giblin title you are actually buying, and where Kevin Trudeau's material picks up the thread.
How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing With People by Les Giblin Book Review: The Short Verdict
- Published: 1956 by Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Open Library records that printing at 164 pages.
- Author: Les Giblin, recorded as Leslie T. Giblin, a career salesman his publisher calls an expert in human relations.
- Core claim: people are driven by the need to feel important and accepted, so deal with human nature as it is.
- Structure: fourteen chapters, indexed by situation rather than by rule.
- The formula: Acceptance, Approval, Appreciation.
- Best chapter: four, on why others reflect your own attitude back at you.
- Before you buy: check the title. Giblin wrote three books on this subject.
- Our rating: 4 out of 5.
What How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People Actually Teaches
Who Les Giblin was
Giblin did not come out of a psychology department. His publisher's author biography states that he was born in 1912 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, took a sales job with the Sheaffer Pen Company in 1946 after military service, and earned two national Salesman of the Year titles door to door. The same biography has him running seminars for Mobil, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson and Caterpillar. The book came out in 1956 from Prentice-Hall in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and reads like what it is: field notes from a man who knocked on a great many doors and kept score.
The premise: deal with human nature as it is
The publisher's own description is the cleanest statement of the method: it explains how to interact with others as they really are, not as you would like them to be, so that you get what you want from them, whether that is cooperation, goodwill, love or security. That sounds mild until you notice what it rules out. Giblin does not ask you to fix anyone, improve anyone, or wait for anyone to become reasonable. He treats human nature as a fixed set of conditions you either work with or lose to, and the condition he returns to is the need to feel important.
The book is indexed by situation, not by principle
The practical effect is that you can open the book at a problem. Meeting somebody Thursday. Correcting an employee. Getting a decision out of a person who does not report to you. Each one has a chapter, and each chapter hands you the techniques before it explains them. Customers, bosses and colleagues all get the same treatment.
The Fourteen Chapters and the Interpersonal Skills Each One Teaches
The contents run to fourteen chapters. Reading the titles straight through tells you more than any summary, because the titles are the index.
| Chapter | Title | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your Key to Success and Happiness | The promise, and the claim about human nature it rests on |
| 2 | How to Use the Basic Secret for Influencing Others | The hunger to feel important, fed honestly |
| 3 | How to Cash In on Your Hidden Assets | Self-regard as an asset, not a private feeling |
| 4 | How to Control the Actions and Attitudes of Others | The mirror argument, the best chapter here |
| 5 | How You Can Create a Good Impression on Others | First meetings |
| 6 | How to Use Three Big Secrets for Attracting People | Acceptance, Approval, Appreciation |
| 7 | How to Make the Other Person Feel Friendly Instantly | Opening moves |
| 8 | How You Can Develop Skill in Using Words | What to say, and how to make it land |
| 9 | How to Use the Technique That a Supreme Court Justice Called White Magic | Listening, as a tool rather than a courtesy |
| 10 | How to Get Others to See Things Your Way Quickly | Persuasion |
| 11 | How to Get 100% Cooperation and Increase Your Brain Power | Work done through people who do not report to you |
| 12 | How to Use Your Miracle Power in Human Relations | The earlier chapters under one name |
| 13 | How to Criticize Others Without Offending Them | Correction without damage |
| 14 | A Simple, Effective Plan of Action That Will Bring You Success and Happiness | The closing plan |
The basic secret and your hidden assets
The basic secret is not a secret at all, which Giblin more or less admits. The ego wants to feel important. What makes the chapter useful is the pair he builds around it: chapter two points that need outward, and chapter three turns it back on you, because your own self-regard is a hidden asset others read and respond to. Most books here treat your inner life as a separate subject. Giblin puts it in the causal chain.
Three big secrets for attracting people, and administering praise
Giblin's compression of the whole book into three words is Acceptance, Approval, Appreciation. Acceptance means granting the other person the right to be who they are and dropping the project of reforming them. Approval means administering praise, and he is specific about where to aim it: at the less obvious virtues rather than the ones everyone already compliments. Appreciation is the operational one. It shows up in small acts, like not keeping people waiting and acknowledging that a person is present.
Three words, and the third is the one most readers skip. Appreciation in Giblin's sense costs nothing and is almost entirely about timing.
Develop skill in using words, and the technique called white magic
Chapters eight and nine are the practical middle of the book. The first is about how you communicate: what to say, in what order, and how much of it. The second is about not talking at all. Its title credits a Supreme Court justice with calling listening white magic, and Giblin means it operationally. Listening sympathetically and understandingly, in his account, is the most effective mechanism for getting along with people, and it is the one skill worth learning that costs nothing and almost nobody practices.
Miracle power in human relations
Chapter twelve puts a name on the compounding effect of everything before it. Treat the label as period packaging: a 1950s sales trainer writing titles that sell, with the same practical human relations work underneath.
The mirror principle
Chapter four is the argument that gives the book its title. You control the actions and attitudes of others chiefly through your own. Act calm and you defuse anger before it starts. Act enthusiastic and the enthusiasm transfers. Act confident and the other person becomes confident in you. They reflect back what they see, which means the only variable you control is yourself.
That is where the book stops being a manners guide. If people mirror you, any gap between your stated attitude and your real one is visible, and it is coming back to you.
What Giblin Does That Dale Carnegie Does Not
These two share a shelf and a reputation, and the comparison is the first thing a buyer wants. They are not the same book, and the differences are structural.
| Dimension | Carnegie, 1936 | Giblin, 1956 |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Behavior. Rules first, reasoning implied | A stated model of human nature, with behavior derived from it |
| Unit of instruction | The rule. Thirty of them, grouped in four parts | The situation. Chapters map to first impressions, conversation, persuasion, managing and criticism |
| Where cause sits | With the other person, and your attention to them | With you. Chapter four says others reflect the attitude you carry |
| Compression | No single formula. You find the thread yourself | Named formula: Acceptance, Approval, Appreciation |
| Intended reader | A general audience, drawn from his course students | Salespeople, managers, anyone needing cooperation they cannot order |
| Evidence base | Anecdotes about public figures and graduates | One man's sales route and corporate seminar rooms |
If you have read Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Giblin will not feel like a repeat. It reads as the explanation Carnegie left out. If you want only one, pick on temperament: Carnegie is warmer, Giblin is faster.
Common Criticisms of How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People
The evidence is one man's sales record
There are no studies here and Giblin never pretends otherwise. His authority is a door-to-door career and a seminar circuit, a real credential and not a scientific one. The claims land as facts because he states them with total confidence, and a reader who wants to know whether the mirror effect is real has nowhere to go. That matters more here than in most self help, because the advice is about other people, so the cost of being wrong is paid in someone else's meeting.
Is any of this manipulation?
It is the standing objection to the whole category and it deserves a straight answer. Giblin's technique is manipulation in exactly one case: when you do not mean it. Acceptance you do not feel, praise you do not believe and appreciation you are performing all fail on his own logic, because chapter four says the other person reads what you carry rather than what you display. Meaning it is the operating requirement, not a moral extra.
The 1950s office
This was written for the man at the desk, and the pronouns, the examples and the assumptions about who is selling and who is buying all show their date. The mechanics survive the period framing. Whether the framing survives your patience is a separate question.
Which Les Giblin Book Are You Actually Buying?
Giblin wrote more than one title on this subject and the listings do not make the difference obvious. His name appears on Skill With People and on The Art of Dealing With People as well, and this 1956 book is the full-length treatment. Skill With People is the pocket version, and readers buy it by mistake constantly.
Editions vary too. Open Library records the 1956 Prentice-Hall printing at 164 pages, a Wilshire Book Company edition at 163, a 1985 Prentice Hall Press printing at 192 and a 1999 Barnes & Noble printing at 164. The current edition at ISBN 9780988727533 runs 188 pages, and print-on-demand reprints and a Spanish translation are also in circulation. Before you buy, check the publisher, the language and the page count, and make sure the title on the cover is the long one.
Why Kevin Trudeau Recommends How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People
Most of Trudeau's material deals with the interior, so a book about handling other people sits at an angle to it. The connection is chapter four.
Giblin says the other person reflects what they see in you, but not much about which part of you they are seeing. Trudeau's answer is his breakdown of the three parts of the mind, in which the layer running your tone, your face and your timing is not the conscious one. Put the two together and Giblin's mirror becomes more useful and more uncomfortable. You are not broadcasting the attitude you selected. You are broadcasting the one installed.
That leads to the standing objection to every book of this kind. Giblin tells you to act confident, and anyone who has tried it knows the acting is the hard part. Trudeau's term for the resistance is counterintentions, subconscious programs he says pull against the goal you consciously stated. On Giblin's own logic a counterintention would not stay hidden. It would show up in the mirror and come back as the other person's coolness, and you would have no idea why.
Which is why Trudeau's position on surface technique reads beside this book rather than against it. His argument that positive thinking on its own is not enough lands where Giblin lands. Both say the interior has to match. One arrived from a 1950s sales route and the other from somewhere else entirely, and they agree on the constraint.
One more connection is worth naming, because it is the part of Giblin most readers skim. His chapter on hidden assets puts personal self-regard inside the causal chain rather than treating it as a private feeling. That is the same territory Maxwell Maltz mapped in Psycho-Cybernetics four years later in 1960. Giblin also belongs with the authors who built their material on a sales floor rather than in a classroom, which is where Zig Ziglar's See You at the Top came from too.
Where This Book Sits Next to the Global Information Network
The Global Information Network is the private membership club Kevin Trudeau founded in 2009, with members in more than 160 countries. Giblin is not part of its curriculum and no one claims otherwise. His usefulness to a reader of Trudeau's material is narrower than that.
A membership organization is, in practice, a series of rooms full of people you have not met. Events, chapters, calls, introductions. Whatever else it is, it is a steady supply of first meetings, and Giblin's book is indexed by exactly those situations. Open it at the chapter that matches Thursday. That is the honest case for owning a copy. For where Trudeau's own writing picks up, start with the complete guide to his books and reading order, and for his account of where the material came from, see his secret society teachings.
Who Should Read It and Who Should Skip It
Read it if your work depends on cooperation you cannot order. Read it if you found Carnegie agreeable but vague, because Giblin supplies the model Carnegie assumed. Read it if you want a book you can open at a specific problem instead of reading front to back.
Skip it if you want evidence, for the reasons set out above, or if the 1950s framing will grate on you.
Skip it also if you already own three books in this category and read none of them. Giblin only pays off on repetition, and the chapter structure invites the behavior most readers avoid: going back.
Our rating: 4 out of 5. It earns the score for giving a model before a technique, for compressing itself honestly into three words, and for the mirror argument in chapter four, which is the most useful thing in the book. It loses a point for period framing that a modern reader has to translate, and for an evidence base that is one man's experience, offered with total confidence and no qualification.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main idea of How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People?
Deal with people as they really are rather than as you would like them to be. Giblin's model is that people are driven by a need to feel important and accepted, and that once you feed that need honestly, cooperation follows. His publisher describes it as a brass tacks approach to communication.
What is Les Giblin's Triple-A formula?
Acceptance, Approval, Appreciation. Acceptance is granting the other person the right to be themselves without trying to reform them. Approval is praise, pointed at the less obvious virtues. Appreciation shows in small acts, such as not keeping people waiting and acknowledging that someone is there.
How many chapters does How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People have?
Fourteen, running from Your Key to Success and Happiness through A Simple, Effective Plan of Action That Will Bring You Success and Happiness. The chapter titles name situations rather than principles, which is what makes the book usable as a lookup.
What is the difference between this book and Skill With People?
They are two different Les Giblin titles on the same subject. This 1956 book is the full-length treatment. Skill With People is the short pocket version, and it is the one most often bought by mistake by readers who wanted the longer manual.
How is this different from How to Win Friends and Influence People?
Carnegie gives thirty rules grouped in four parts and argues from anecdote. Giblin states a model of human nature first, then derives the behavior, and organizes the book by situation rather than by rule. Giblin also puts your own attitude in the causal chain: chapter four argues that other people reflect back what they see in you.
Who was Les Giblin?
His publisher's biography states he was born in 1912 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, began selling for the Sheaffer Pen Company in 1946 after military service, and won two national Salesman of the Year titles. He later ran seminars for companies including Mobil, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson and Caterpillar.
Why does Kevin Trudeau recommend this book?
Because chapter four connects directly to his own material. Giblin argues that people reflect the attitude you carry. Trudeau's position is that the attitude being carried is generated below conscious control, which is what his counterintentions concept describes, and that is why acting confident is harder than Giblin makes it sound.
A short manual organized by situation. One evening is enough to see whether it fits how you work, and this review will still be here if you want to check a chapter first.