Pjous Jevit Yuk' Vak Vey

Enjoy this!! It's fresh, they speak with their own voice. The song is also good.

How can you change another person?

Q: How can you change another person?
A: You cannot change another person, however there are things you can do to assist someone who has asked you to help them change. The techniques of motivational interviewing can help someone resolve their ambivalence, uncertainty, and indecision about change, set a new and clear direction, increase their commitment to change, help them plan the steps they need to take, and give them confidence to make the changes they have decided on. The book Motivational Interviewing, by William Miller and Stephen Rollnick describes the technique in detail.

If someone has decided to make a change in their life, they may invite or request your assistance. Certainly you can help them. Before acting to help another person change it is important to preserve their autonomy, help them act consistently with their values, and overcome their inevitable urges to indulge impulses. Consider the example of a friend who asks you to help them stop smoking. Begin by agreeing on your role—what it is they want you to do and don’t want you to do. Who announces their plan for quitting smoking? If you see them smoking, or smell smoke, or see cigarettes or ashes around their house, what do they want you do? If they beg you to “let them have just one cigarette today and that will be all for the week” how should you respond? Understand and do what they actually want, not what you think they want or what you want for them. You can always encourage them to change for the better, but avoid nagging, coercing, patronizing, indulging, enabling, extorting, or coercing them.

Keep in mind that pleasing someone may not be helping them. You can please someone by assisting them in satisfying an impulse. But you may be indulging them rather than helping them. To help someone you have to assist them in acting consistently with their values. That may be much more difficult. This is the distinction between short-term pleasure and long-term gratification. Understand this distinction, and how the person you are offering to help wants you to do handle this inevitable conflict.

You can provide incentives to help someone make a positive change in their lives. For example, parents may offer money to a student for getting good grades. But in planning this approach it is important to understand the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Use the money briefly only to focus on a goal of helping the student discover effective study habits and the intrinsic joys of learning, discovering, and achieving. These can provide life-long benefits. If instead the transaction degenerates into the narrow deal “no money, no work” then when the money stops, the studying stops, and the student has learned only greed, instrumental behavior, and dependency. The play stops when the pay stops.

Influence causes change. People are remarkably susceptible to influence. We buy the latest fashions, prefer Pepsi over Coke, listen to the music that is most cleverly promoted, submit to many forms of peer pressure, and go along with the crowd, even if that requires becoming the rebel. Influence—achieving belief—is a powerful approach to changing what people believe, think, and do. It is effective, nearly invisible, and ubiquitous. Some influences, for example choosing an excellent role model, are constructive. Many influences, such as the ones that cause you to start smoking because you think it will make you cool, are destructive. Pay attention to the influences in your life, and make decisions based on your own well thought-out core values, not on today’s fads.

You can describe how you would like the person to change, why you believe it would be beneficial, and ask them to change. Engage them in a dialogue about the benefits of the change. Perhaps they will agree with your thinking and grant your request.

How you treat another person certainly affects how they behave, and how they treat you. When you treat someone respectfully as an intelligent peer, they are likely to respond similarly to you. If you treat them disrespectfully, they are likely to retaliate in some way. Both parties participate in each relationship. Perhaps the best way to get someone to change is to change how you treat them.

Coercion changes immediate behavior but often at the cost of long term resentment and anxiety. It causes people to act out of fear, or to select from a smaller set of alternatives. Coercive threats, ranging from “share your candy with me or I won’t be your best friend” to “Give me your money or I’ll shoot” are fast acting and long lasting. But they still depend on the free will of the victim. Gandhi said “You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.” People resent coercion, the vindictive passions run strong, they rarely ever forget, and they are passionate about revenge and retaliation. Coercion relies on fear and unleashes anger, hatred, and the destructive cycle of revenge. It is a short sighted expediency with long-term costs.

Because you cannot change another person, you may decide that the best way to move forward with your life is to disengage from theirs. If they don’t understand their freedom ends where yours begins then it may be best to keep them at a distance. They have no right to trespass on your privacy, time, space, or attention. The intent in disengaging is to protect yourself so you can move forward with your life. It is not to punish them, teach them a lesson, or to ensure they get what they deserve. It may be helpful to discuss with them your reasons for the separation.

It is always helpful to keep in mind what you can change and what you cannot. It helps to attain the wisdom to know the difference. Certainly you cannot change the past, human nature, personality, or the laws of mathematics and physics. You can only change another person if they truly want to change and have requested your help in making the change.

You Can Only Change Yourself

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.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central and has been writing about mental health and psychology issues online since 1992.

How Do You Change Yourself?

What Is Happiness?

If you are thinking about changing your life for the better, one way to start is by identifying your goals. You are probably hoping to find some version of happiness or emotional well-being. That might look like any combination of the following:

• A sense of freedom
• Self-esteem
• Self-confidence
• Happy to get up in the morning
• Working toward goals
• A sense of purpose in life
• Satisfying relationships

What Is Unhappiness?

If you are thinking about changing your life, you may be experiencing some combination of the following elements:

• Feeling sad, lethargic or depressed
• Feeling afraid
• Abusing or being addicted to alcohol or drugs
• Feeling lonely
• Anxiety
• Problems with relationships
• Not getting what you want in life; feeling frustrated in working toward goals
• Not caring enough to have goals

How Will You Change?

When you decide to change your life, try the following ideas.

1. Explore your feelings. Keep a journal, talk to a trusted friend, work with a professional counselor.

2. Envision your future. Write in a journal, make a collage, do a guided visualization, talk to a friend or counselor, research the possibilities.

3. Explore wishes and dreams. Keep a journal, talk to a trusted friend, work with a professional counselor.

4. Be open to new ideas. Take a class, travel, say yes to things you may have avoided in the past.

5. Look for kindred spirits. Avoid people who make you feel bad about yourself, seek out those who make you blossom, reach out to those with similar interests and dreams.

6. Try something different. Deliberately buy new items, try different brands, shop at different stores, do the opposite of what you usually do, see different movies, read different kinds of books and magazines.

7. Set goals and targets. Learn how to set useful goals, follow through, evaluate progress regularly, reward yourself for achievement.

8. Take one step at a time. Divide your goals into tiny pieces and do one small new thing each day, starting now.

9. Look for lessons. Remind yourself that experiences are not good or bad; they are simply lessons.

How to Overcome Your Resistance to Change

Have you ever noticed that when you think about changing your life, you feel resistant? Many people say that they not only feel resistant, but they actually do things to keep their lives familiar. They do things like start a diet and then eat a candy bar on the first day, or quit smoking and then sneak a puff.

There are some things you can do to make yourself less resistant. Here are six effective strategies:

1. Eliminate clutter. Clutter can be viewed as a sign of uncertainty. Accumulating "stuff" might be stopping you from committing to an important thing. If you keep a lot of half-started projects around, it makes it difficult to zero in on the really important things.

2. Start small. Thinking of your overall goal can be overwhelming. So manage your resistance by choosing one small part of it and attacking it today. Let's say your goal is to lose 20 pounds. That can certainly seem like an impossible thing to accomplish. It will seem more doable if you tell yourself, I'm going to lose five pounds by (date).

3. Disprove your disempowering beliefs. In Reinventing Your Life, authors Young and Klosko suggest that you identify the beliefs that keep you from succeeding. They offer a way to dispute those beliefs by asking, "Is there really an evidence today that this belief is true?" They suggest making a list of the evidence.

4. Remind yourself of all of your available options. You always have alternatives and the power to choose among them.

5. Take responsibility for what you want. Look for signs that you are blaming your situation on others or not admitting past mistakes. Acknowledge them and move on.

6. Visualize the future. Author Barbara Sher suggests one way to do this: Write an imaginary press release about yourself. The date is today's date, two years in the future. The press release is announcing the most extraordinary event you can think of. It doesn't matter whether this event seems only vaguely possible to you. The important thing is that it is exciting to imagine.

When to Seek Professional Help

Sometimes it makes sense to find a professional counselor to work with as you work through the change process. Here are some ways to know when that would be appropriate:

1. You've tried several things but you still have the problem.

2. You want to find a solution sooner rather than later.

3. You have thoughts of harming yourself or others.

4. You have symptoms of depression, anxiety, or another disorder that are significantly interfering with your daily functioning and the quality of your life. For example, you have lost time from work, your relationships have been harmed, your health is suffering. These are signs that you may need the help of a trained, licensed professional.

Garrett Coan, MSW, LCSW is Founder and Director of the Center for Creative Counseling, a team of expert and licensed therapists and coaches providing phone and internet counseling services to clients throughout the United States and worldwide. A full library of articles from this author are available at http://www.stressmanagementboutique.com/Article_Library.html To arrange a no-obligation, complimentary consultation, call 1-877-95-UGROW (1-877-958-4769) or visit them on the Web at http://www.creativecounselors.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Garrett_Coan

Garrett Coan - EzineArticles Expert Author