Why We Can’t Make Someone else Change?
Here’s a reason why.
Each one of us has someone ( or several someones) whom we like to change.
You may really like them to pieces, but there are some habits or traits you wish were otherwise.
Sometimes the changes are relatively minor. You’d love it if they broke some annoying habits such as being late to everything or finishing our sentences for us.
In some cases, you want to make some deeper or more fundamental changes to who they are. Like not being emotionally available to you, stopping alcohol consumption, or not being a good listener. In this case, you want to change their “habitual center of personal energy.” And honestly, that cannot be changed by another.
Let us first understand the habitual center of personal energy.
Habitual Center of Personal Energy
Let’s consider an athlete in pursuit of a championship. In this scenario, relationships, education, and social interaction, for example, are all secondary to that one goal.
Their habitual center will be only that goal and all the necessary needs to be done to achieve it. In their process, people or commitments take the back seat.
When a person’s life has had such a singular focus, but the goals remain unachieved, an existential crisis may happen.
Let’s consider yet another example. Here’s another case of people who begin to struggle with addictive behaviors such as alcohol, and drugs, and certain behaviors are their habitual centers. Relationships have been ruined, careers crashed, opportunities lost and dreams shattered.
In both the above cases, the usual tactics of pleading, cajoling, shaming, and manipulating are not effective methods to change their habitual center of personal energy.
Yeah, you can’t change another person no matter how hard you try. If you put up any effort too, it may have the opposite effect on them.
The motivation must be the person’s own and not yours.
Two necessary Features for making a change
Is it possible to change that center and create a new one?
It’s possible only when the compelling force acts differently.
To cultivate that willingness to change, people need to have two things in their minds.
The first is a clear sense of how the present
ways of living are incomplete, harmful, or not good enough and even working against them.
Most people who struggle with addiction become experts at pointing out all the messed up things like lost relationships, and perhaps most importantly, lost themselves or the plans for their lives. This recognition of their losses is necessary but not sufficient enough for change.
The second thing is to have in mind to make genuine change is a positive ideal that they long to compass or set as their points of orientation. These ideals or visions of a good life may seem completely inaccessible or even impossible to people who have become trapped in a loop of wrongness and incompleteness.
Final talk
Honestly, no one of us can change the habitual center of personal energy of another, you can possibly affect the conditions that will either hinder or facilitate change.
You make it harder when you act in ways that keep a person locked in the loop of wrongness and incompleteness. You facilitate positive change when you help a person identify the ideals they long to compass, remaining ever mindful that our lives may temporarily serve as that ideal.
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