One of the hardest things for many people to deal with is wanting change for someone in their lives. Most often this involves a behavior or behaviors that you perceive to be detrimental to them and know for a fact that their behavior is detrimental to you.
Most don’t realize that the change they are wanting to see in that person must start with themselves. Or put another way, the change you want to see must first start with you. And yes, I can hear you saying, “Wait! What! I’m not the one with the problem.” Okay, I’ll bite. You don’t have the behavioral issue, but you do have a problem with “their” behavior. This is what I call understanding the nuances of life.
You must deal with “your problem” that “you have” with their behavior first. Intervention or intercession or whatever it is you are doing is unlikely to succeed. Why? There are myriads of reasons, but I’ll go with my top three. These are both from personal and professional experiences.
- People are not going to change until they are ready to commit to change. What this translates to is that they need to be able to see what change looks like, feels like, sounds like, tastes like, and smells like before they commit to changing their current lifestyle or behaviors. And that has to be found on their own terms. Not by someone dictating what that must be.
- Stop using the label ‘problem’ to describe and express what’s going on. Start thinking in terms of a situation that you want to change.
- You need to be the change that you want to see. What does that even mean? You need to see them and interact with them based on what you want to experience, not what you want them to be. And stop seeing them as they are in their current situation. What this boils down to is interacting with them in the theater of your mind, or your imagination and experience the change that you want to experience. Aghhhh! What are you talking about Wendy?
As part of the human condition, we are hardwired to want to ‘fix it’. If someone has a problem/situation we want to rush in and ‘fix it’. We use our life experiences, along with probabilities to create a prognosis of what can happen if change or a course correction is not made and made NOW! The irony is that the prognosis or calling it as you see it is usually 100% accurate. However, whether you are right or wrong isn’t the issue. I refer you back to number 1. People are not going to change until they are ready to commit to change. And to make that commitment they will have to have had their own experience within the theater of their own mind.
Candidly I’ll share this, with my hand on my heart, and the other handheld up to God, I can say that nine times out of 10, my rushing in to ‘fix it’ has exploded in my face. And to add insult to injury, the blame for everything that has happened, past, present, and future is then unceremoniously dumped at my feet. And nothing positive has changed for me or for them, other than another layer of unpleasantness has been added to an already complex and incendiary relationship. This is a cautionary tale that underscores the fact that we don’t know what someone’s life purpose is, nor their journey that they meant to take. Therefore, we cannot fix anybody. We have a heck of a time trying to fix ourselves!
Just so we are on the same page, this blog isn’t about not giving support and or lending a helping hand. It’s about us not making choices for other people, who unless they are certifiable, can make choices for themselves…even if we believe that they are making the wrong choices.
Is any of this easy? Hell NO! There’s nothing easy about any of this. Is it painful? You mean watching a loved one wreck their lives in slow motion, disrupting or destroying everything they touch, decimating relationships, families, friendships, careers, then hell yes, it’s painful. It’s the kind of pain that robs you of your breath and cuts you to your soul. And yet is it doable? Is changing YOU a viable solution to someone else’s problem? The answer to that is categorically NO! Listen up people, you cannot be a viable solution for anyone else’s problem. You can only be a viable solution for your own problem.
And that brings us right back to where we started this conversation. You must be the change that you want to see. The only way that you can be a conduit of change for anyone is predicated on how you show up on your personal screen of space. Or how you show up in life. Not how you want them to show up in your life. It’s about how you choose to show up in theirs.
Takeaway: Lest we forget, our lives are created by the words that we choose to speak, and the thoughts we choose to embrace as our truth and belief. So, make a conscious choice to change your internal dialog. Transmute your thoughts by replacing them with what you want to see yourself doing and embrace that as your truth. Keep embracing that as your truth and it will become your belief. And what you believe you’ll manifest. Another powerful thing to remember is simply this, as you change, everything around you must change too. That’s God’s Law. That’s a natural law, that’s a spiritual law and it is immutable.
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof,”
Proverbs 18:21 KJ