Ep #16: How to Change Someone
episode summary
Do you ever find yourself wishing you could change someone close to you?
Join the club! We're all getting matching shirts. 😄
But seriously - we all have people in our lives who would be so much easier to deal with if we could just tweak a few things about them. In this episode, I'm sharing how I shifted my own perspective on this and giving you steps for thinking through your situation and deciding how you want to handle it. You've got options!
And remember: the only person you can truly change is yourself.
For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.
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CHAPTERS:
4:03 - Two Lists
9:19 - Acceptance
12:05 - Action
listen to the episode:
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Hey, I'm Michelle Gauthier and you're listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. Hello friends, thanks for joining today. Today we're going to be talking about how to change other people. I was motivated to write this podcast for a kind of random, silly reason, but I think it can be a good example of what happens in our minds when someone is driving us crazy or something they're doing is driving us crazy and we really want to change it. So my son - who's 16, will be 16 by the time this airs - every single night he takes off our dog's collar. There's no reason for this. He just perceives in his mind that it's more comfortable for her to sleep if he takes off her collar. Okay, that alone is not a big deal, but he never, ever puts it back on in the morning. And this is important because my dog is a little bit of a runaway. And if we open the front door, she will 100% run out the door if she sees a dog or someone else. She doesn't run away like far away, but she gets away from us. And she's a big dog, so the only way that I can really keep her in control is to grab her collar and hold on to her. So when I open the front door because they go to deliver groceries and she's going to run out there and say hi to the person, I have to grab her collar to keep her in the house. And if her collar's not on, there's nothing I can grab and I can't out muscle her if she doesn't have it on. So I have asked my son oh my gosh, I can't even tell you how many times. Every time I would wake up in the morning and I would see the dog and she wouldn't have the collar on, I'd be like, oh my gosh, why does he have to take that off? I tried explaining to him that she doesn't need to have her collar off, that she's perfectly comfortable with it on, that it's dangerous if she doesn't have it on, because what if she runs outside and we can't get a hold of her and she goes out in the street? That I don't care if he takes it off, as long as he puts it back on. I mean a million things over this tiny little problem and finally I realized, okay, what I need to do is I need to change myself, I need to accept that he's going to keep doing this and it's not that big of a deal. And when I wake up in the morning, I will either remind him to put it on or just put it back on myself and just stop worrying about this, because it was driving me crazy that he wouldn't change in the way I wanted him to change. So I just accepted it and just either tell him to do it or just do it myself. Not a big deal. Changing your thinking on this kind of thing is truly life-changing, because you can just stop worrying about what the other person is doing and just decide what you want to do instead. Same can go for small things, like your kids leaving their socks everywhere. What is up with the socks? Why do they take them off and leave them on the kitchen counter? So, instead of getting mad about it every time, you can just throw them in the dirty clothes. Or I have a friend who just throws them away, and then, when her kid runs out of socks, she just doesn't buy them new ones. So we have a lot more power than we think in these situations, but the power to change someone often belongs in the power that we have to change ourselves, in the way that we're looking at the situation. So today I'm going to talk you through how to change someone else. I'm going to give you the steps for thinking about what you want to do about the situation and exactly how to do it. You've got several different options. By the end of the podcast, you'll be able to decide okay, is this something I want to talk to this person about, or do I just want to accept it? Do I want to take action or do I just want to live with it? So that way, you feel at peace about your decision. So if you have tuned in today, I'm guessing that there is someone in your life that you would love to change. So I want you to bring that person to mind and to think about them. And, as I go through these examples, think about your particular situation so that by the end, you can kind of have an action plan about what to do with this, so that it can stop bugging you. So let's just say it's your husband. Even though I don't have a husband, I've previously had a husband, so it's no trouble for me to come up with a list like this. So focus on your husband. And we're going to start off by doing two things. One is we're going to start first with writing down all of the things that you want to change about them. Let's leave it to five. We don't want to get too crazy with our list. Number one is I want him to be faster, like in everything in life, when you pick up take out, get home faster. If we're getting ready to go somewhere, get ready faster. Just be faster in general in life. Number two, stop being late. And if you are going to be late, at least call. Number three, never look at your phone when you're with me, because there's no reason. Number four, walk the dog without being asked. That's the without being asked. That's the big part. And number five, notice when I look nice and tell me. All right. So now you've got your list of five things that you wanna change about the person. Next, we are going to flip our mindset to the opposite and we are gonna think about five compliments, five things that we love or at least like. Next, I'm gonna give you an example of a coworker. So you might not absolutely love a ton of things about your coworker, but with your husband you probably do. So what are some things that you love about him? Try to come up with five of those too. They have nothing to do with the complaints. Number one is you make me laugh, you're a good dad, you're kind even to strangers and people you don't know, you let me sleep in, and you make me coffee every morning. So those are five things that I love, and I want you to first, before we address the complaint list - I want you to take that compliment list and really think about it and let each one of those items sink in, even if you wrote it down, even just take a picture of that list and maybe even text the person a message that says something like, "I just want you to know that I noticed that you make my coffee every morning and that I really appreciate it and it makes me happy". Even tell them what it is that you love about them. Now, sometimes doing this 'The things I love about you' list is enough. That just makes the other list that you made go away. Like you know what, the things I'm complaining about are not that big of a deal. I'm just going to let them go and I'm going to focus on the positives and leave it at that. So great. If that's the case with the example that you just did, then great. But if you still want to work on changing the person from your original five things. Hang in there. I'm going to tell you exactly what to do next. I want to go through a different example, because if it's someone who you don't know as well, like a coworker, and they're driving you crazy, you will have a different complaint list and a different compliment list about them. So let's go through the list of a coworker and think about some of the things that might drive you crazy about them. Number one, stop being so negative all the time. Number two two, quit about everyone at work. Number three three, up to meetings on time. Number four four, my emails faster. And number five five, eating my snacks. Okay, I'm assuming this is in a real office. No one's eating the snacks in my office, so I never even see my coworker. Now, when we think about the other side of this list and think about compliments for this person, I might say you're great at handling angry customers. You share what you know and you're willing to help your coworkers. You volunteer to help with other things at work, like fun events that we do. You're thorough in the job that you do and you bring donuts to the office sometimes and when you do, you share them. Okay, so if this person's just getting on your nerves for that day and you write down this whole compliment list and you realize you know what, t here's a lot more good than bad there. And when it's someone like a coworker, if they work for you, it might be different, and if they're your spouse or your best friend, who you spend a ton of time with, it's different than someone who's your coworker who you don't have a lot of influence over. So sometimes you can just let it go. But again, if there are things on that complaint list that you want to try to address, then I'm going to tell you how to do that. So here we sit with a person who we want to change, their complaints list, and their compliments list. We focused on the compliments list. You've maybe even told them or thanked them for some of the things that you really appreciate them. Now we're going to focus on the list of things that you want to change. I've said this before on this podcast, but not in this episode, so I'm just going to say it again: if you want to change a person, the person that you can change is you, and I know that's really frustrating sometimes and people get really irritated when I say that, but it's true, the only thing that we can control is our self, our own actions, our own thoughts and our own feelings. So I just want to remind you that, even when you want to make someone change, you can't make them change. You can't like mold them into the human who you want them to be - even your kids. See my earlier example. And we've all tried going that route of changing someone and it really usually just ends up, first of all, it never works, and, second of all, it usually ends up just feeling really frustrating. So when you think of all the things that you want to change about the person, you essentially have two options. One is acceptance and the other is to take action. So let's go the route of acceptance first, a nd I'm going to walk through an example of what that could be. So you can have the kind of acceptance where you're like you know what, now that I think about it, this isn't really a huge deal and I'm just going to choose to let it go. So something like that might be my coworker who's eating my snacks. I'm like, you know what? It's not that big of a deal. When she brings food into work, she shares it. This just isn't that big of a deal. I'll just buy extra snacks and I really don't care. I'm just going to cross that one off my list. And on the one with my husband walking the dog, without being asked, maybe I just accept, okay, usually when he's had a busy day he might not be thinking about walking the dog, but if I ask him to walk the dog, he always does it. I'm just not going to make a big deal of that, I'm just going to ask him. So there's that level of acceptance where you just decide you know what, this is not a problem. The second part of acceptance is a bigger deal, but accepting "this is not something that I can change and that the person who I'm asking to change would have to be very motivated to change that themselves in order to change it". So, for example, if your coworker is someone who just defaults to having a negative outlook on everything all the time, there is truly nothing you can do about that, even if you said could you try to be more positive? If she wanted to try to be more positive, she could. She could hire me as her life coach and she could totally change her mindset in her life. But she's going to want to have to do that. So sometimes when the change is so big, something as big as like stop being so negative all the time, or like stop being so slow - so if a person is you know, like I was saying about my pretend husband that I don't have - be faster, like when you pick up takeout and you just run to pick it up, hurry up and come back, when we're getting ready to go somewhere, just like get your shoes on and get out the door. If you have people in your life who are like this - and I have several - that's just the speed that they run, and I run on a faster speed in life. And if they told me that I had to slow down, it would drive me crazy and I would have a really hard time doing it. Those are two things that are like pretty ingrained in how they behave and they've probably behaved in that way for a long, long time. So those would be hard for them to change and sometimes the best thing to do there is just to accept, okay, that's how this person is and I'm just going to try to love them as they are. Okay. So those are the two kinds of acceptance: the "I'm going to decide it's not a big deal, whatever", or I see that this is a big deal, but I also acknowledge that this is something that I can't change. Okay, and then the other option. First there's acceptance, the other option is to take action. So if you want to take action on it, you can do two things You can say something and ask them to change, or you can set a boundary. Let's take a look at the example of our coworker. If she's gossiping about everyone, one thing - I'm just thinking back to the days when I used to work in a cubicle and someone would come over and gossip or talk to me about someone else in the office and I'd be like sweating bullets, looking around, thinking, oh great, this person's going to walk up and they're going to think that I'm like party to this whole situation and I don't want to have anything to do with this, but how do I get out of it? That's a great place to set a boundary. I've got a whole episode on how to set boundaries, so if you want to go back and listen to that and get all the details, you can do that. That is episode number four. So if you want to go back, you can listen to that. But just in general, how you would do that in this situation is you would decide that the rule that you have, this new boundary, is that you're not going to participate in gossip conversations, and then you would tell your coworker, "Hey, I am just not going to talk about these things anymore at work. It doesn't make me feel good, it makes me feel stressed, and so if you want to talk about other coworkers or talk about these kinds of things, please don't do it to me, do it to someone else," and then you have to hold the boundary. So the next time she comes up and says did you hear what? so, and so did. You can just say I didn't. But remember, i'm not talking about those kinds of things anymore. So that's the kind of action that would include setting a boundary. The other kind of action that you can take is to talk to the person and tell them what effect this is having on you and ask them to change. You can never make them change, but you can certainly ask them to change. That's totally within your control. So if we think about the coworker who doesn't show up to meetings on time, again, this is your coworker, not your employee. So you don't really have position power over this person. But you could say, "Hey, why are you always late to our team meetings? I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about it and tell you what the impact is, because when you show up like seven minutes late every time or 10 minutes late every time, we have to go back and repeat everything that everyone said. So is there something you could do or something I could help you with, so that you could get to the meetings on time and ask them to start showing up on time? Same with your husband. If your husband looking at his phone when you're together drives you crazy, you can say, "Hey, I just wanted to tell you" and don't don't tell him this in the heat of the moment when you're mad about it, when you're not mad and he's not looking at his phone. I just wanted to tell you that when you look at your phone, it makes me feel really unimportant And it makes me feel like you don't really want to be with me. So I feel like we should not use our phones when we're like hanging out and actually talking to each other. What would you think if we didn't use our phones when we're together?" or maybe you never use your phone What would you think about not using your phone or putting your phone away on the charger in the evenings when we're hanging out as a family? He might get offended and say no, and then that's kind of the end of what you can do. But he might say oh, i'm sorry, i didn't realize it was affecting you like that. Yeah, i'll try that. No big deal, i'll do that. So if you take one of those actions either acceptance or taking action even though acceptance isn't like talking to them about it, it's still you're taking an action. Because you're accepting it, you will be able to change yourself and you will feel less annoyed about the situation because you have addressed it, either in your own mind or with the person. Okay, that is it. That's all for this episode. I hope that this helps you. I hope that this will help you be less annoyed when you have the equivalent of someone taking off your dog's collar every day. Such a random small example, but I'm telling you guys, it was driving me crazy. I also hope it will help you accept that the person who you can change is yourself, and that you can change your actions and the way that you're thinking about things. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthier.com. See you next week.
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