You Can Only Change Yourself

By JOHN M GROHOL PSYD

One of life’s hardest lessons to learn is that you can only change yourself.

Some people spend inordinate amounts of time and energy upset, angry, or frustrated
by other people’s thoughts and behaviors.

But to what end? You can rail against the rain or feel sanguine about the snow, but
there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Why should we, by default, believe we can
change another person’s — an independent, thinking self just like us — behaviors and
thoughts with just a few choice words? If you think about it for a minute, it sounds kind
of ridiculous.

Yet we don’t think about it when we have an emotional reaction to someone else’s
behavior or words. We say things like, “How could they say such a thing!” or “How can
anyone be so rude!?” or “Don’t they know how much they hurt me? Why do they do
that?!”

We often react in this way because our emotions are a part of most people’s innate
decision-making skills. We react and respond emotionally to emotional needs of our
own, rather than in a logical, rational manner. So when someone touches one of these
emotional needs, we can respond in a way that may not make a whole lot of sense to
an outside observer.

What you can do, just once, is to make a polite request for another to stop the behavior
that you find frustrating, annoying or disturbing. But that’s it, just once (or maybe
twice, if you feel the person really didn’t hear or understand the initial request). After
that, you just become a nag and will be ignored. Repeating something over and over
again doesn’t suddenly make people more aware of themselves, it just makes them
aware of how annoying you can be.

There’s no magic to stopping trying to change other people’s behavior. Catch your
thoughts (by writing them down in a journal or blog, for instance) when you find
yourself saying something like, “I wish she wouldn’t do..” or “I can’t believe he thinks
that…” — things like that. Making a note of it, mental or otherwise, allows you to pause
your automatic thinking before you jump to the next step in your response (which is
usually to say something to the person).
If you’ve already said something, now’s the time to stop and go no further. Unless
you’re the other person’s parent, they’ve probably already heard it and may have even
tried stopping the behavior. Hearing it again isn’t going to suddenly change their
behavior.

People can spend weeks, months and in some cases years in psychotherapy working on
changing their thoughts or behaviors. That’s because such change often takes that long
to understand, practice, and then implement. Behaviors most important to others are
also likely behaviors that are important to ourselves and not readily changed, even if we
wanted to. They sometimes are integrated part of another’s personality or way of
thinking about and looking at the entire world.

So save yourself some frustration today and try to learn to stop trying to change others.
Focus instead on changing your own faults and you may find yourself living a happier
and more peaceful life.