If you want to be successful at influencing another to change, learn to focus on changing your own behavior first as a means to influence that change.
Relationship Tips
Trusting yourself
Summary
Mnemonic
To motivate another’s behavior to rearrange, first your own you’ll have to change. (13)
Problem
A common situation in a coaching session is to find myself listening to a client that is explaining in great detail how their partner, the person that they’re interested in, or whomever, is behaving poorly or badly. As my client vents to let off some anger and frustration, and that’s primarily what they’re doing, they simultaneously provide me with a great number of details that illustrate and validate why they feel like they are being treated badly. Usually the description they give is pretty convincing, but the problem is that what they are sharing doesn’t show them a way out of the problem and instead seems to further entrench their spinning wheels in the proverbial mud.
Solution
On the positive side, what works much better is a situation whereby the client is still noticing and describing how the other person behaved badly, but is still able to focus on the actions that they contributed to the situation and consider with my encouragement how they might have shown up differently from their end of the interaction in a manner that might have produced a different interaction altogether or at least a different outcome. So many of us spend our time and energy helplessly wishing or angrily complaining about how ‘others’ need to change. And though others do need to change and sometimes do eventually change; we all understand that the one person that we have the most chance of influencing to change, is ourselves. I am not saying that we can’t influence others at all, heck, I am working to influence my listeners right now. But the amount of influence that can be leveraged from me toward you will likely be less than the leverage that you can apply to influencing yourself. To start this process the first step, the very first step, is to take ownership that it take two (or more) people to have a disagreement in the first place. And from that moment forward, your work is to shift your attention, that’s it, just your attention, away from what the other person is saying or doing, and toward how you are responding. This is where your true empowerment ignites and where you will begin to feel some real movement in any relationship dynamic that you find yourself in. Once you begin to see yourself as changing and showing growth, then you will become a real, authentic example in the world of that change that you’ve imagined. And if the personal changes that you’re making connect deeply with others that interact with you, then based on my experience you will begin to see that others are willing to walk that path of accountability and personal power with you, but of course, only if they decide that it’s their own idea to do.