When YOU Change – Others CHANGE!

Have you ever wished for someone in your life to just change?  Have you thought, “if only he or she would make a change then everything would just be better”.  The trouble with this type of thinking is that you make your happiness dependent upon the changes of someone else.  Can you make someone else change?  Do you have this power?  I believe we may, but not so directly as one may hope and not always in the way one may expect.  The change always starts with YOU!

 The only person you have first-hand power to change is YOU! 

When you realize this and put it into ACTION, you will start to see something AMAZING unfold.  But let me warn you, it doesn’t happen overnight!

There is power in self-change and it goes beyond ourselves.  If you have someone in your life that isn’t doing or saying or acting the way you want, stop trying to get them to change and start seeing how you can change yourself when you respond to them, talk to them and interact with them.  Sometimes we are the culprit of our own frustrations.  For this blog, I will give a simple example using a very barky dog named, Duke.

A very barky dog named Duke was always disrupting the peace and quiet of his owner’s home through his excessive barking.  The owner constantly felt angry at Duke and wished he would just change.  Duke’s owner would yell at him to stop and would send him outside in the backyard in a fit of frustration instead of trying a different approach or response.  “Why can’t you just be like your sister, Daisy who is sweet and quite and obedient?”, his owner wished.  After many years of frustration and wishing Duke would just change and stop barking, the owner decided that maybe she should change instead!  Maybe if she learned to understand why Duke was barking, approached and responded to him differently, and changed some internal thoughts about Duke it may help her cope better in the situation and gain some peace.  This did not come without it’s challenges!  She had to learn to be patient with Duke, to respond to him with calmness instead of anger and to let him know her expectations before his barking fest would start.  She learned to cue into him and she learned that she needed to make the changes first.  Eventually with great effort as Duke’s owner changed by becoming more understanding, patient and by laying out her expectations for their dynamic relationship, something incredible happened to Duke.  Duke learned when it was ok to bark and when it wasn’t.  Duke learned patience.  Duke calmed down and doesn’t bark nearly as much as he used to.  The owner felt more power over the situation because she made a change in herself.  

You must be wondering what the lesson is here…

We are all like the dog owner at times, wishing so bad that someone else would change and failing to realize that no change will happen if we don’t make the first move.  Just as Duke’s owner had to admit to her own contributing behavior and how it was fueling Duke’s barking, we too must own our part in relationships.  It’s up to us to change our own approach first.  We can start by understanding how what we do or don’t do is being perceived by another person.  Just as Duke perceived his owner’s anger or release to the backyard as a green light to bark, we often perceive other people’s actions or reactions as cues to behave towards them in a certain way.  You can see how when you react to someone in a calm way versus an angry way, you will surely give them a different perception of you and they will have a different reaction.  They may even have some thought behind this perception and see something about themselves that they may not have seen otherwise.  This takes time and doesn’t happen overnight.  We are creatures of habit and change is very difficult for some.  If you are frustrated with a situation or relationship, you may want to ask yourself what areas you need to change in first.  If you take the focus off of the other person and put it on yourself, now you have power!  When you start to work on yourself honestly and truly with only the intention that you want peace and happiness in your own life, then what other’s do won’t matter so much.  Once you truly change, you will notice that the people around you start to treat you differently, may even admire what they see in the “new” you and may even want to make their own changes or they just may not bother you so much anymore because you found a more powerful focus – YOU!

Change YOU and watch the change that happens in others!

Sheri