Changing Others

What do you do when those you love are engaged in self-destructive behavior? The common self-help doctrine of the day says to focus on yourself! You can’t change them anyway. You have to wait until they are ready. You can’t make them happy. For that matter, you can’t make them sad either! You can’t use your personal will to make them angry, get a job, stop smoking or wiggle their big toe. So stop trying to change other people. Change yourself instead. That is all you can do.

After having said that, I would like to say that a big chunk of this ideology might be right, but the other half is absolutely wrong. In some cases, even dangerously wrong. While it is true that those you love must make individual choices for their own well being that you or anyone else cannot make for them, their best, most powerful hope for change…Is YOU. In reality, the people you love who need to make major changes in their life are unlikely to do it on their own. But they can and will make changes with the loving support and encouragement of people who genuinely care about them. And if their life is in danger in some way by the choices they are making you cannot afford to ‘wait until they are ready’.
Amazingly, study after study shows that we often reflect those we hang out with the most. You hang with people who spend money recklessly; you may be prone to similar behavior. You hang with people who drink and smoke, your chances of drinking and smoking go up. You hang with people who are angry or have destructive habits and it is likely that you will feel angry much of the time or take on those habits yourself. Of course if the people we hang with are happy, health-conscious and wealthy, our propensity towards those things increases as well. Our best chance for change is with each other!

It is not about not being with negative people. It is about filling your life with so many good people and relationships that we become the positive force for change for the person we love so much. So, in a way, we can change them! Their change is in our relationship. Don’t give up. Change may take time, but it can also happen in an instant.

Peace,

Michael