I don’t care who you are. In all likelihood, you want to change people.
If you’re a marketer, you want customers to use your widget instead of another. You probably also want them to believe that yours is the best, the fastest, the safest, the cheapest… If you’re in the corporate transformation business, you want people to believe in whatever new initiative you are peddling. And if you have a personal life, well, you have all sorts of changes you’d like to see. You want your teenager not to be such a pain in the ass. You want your boss to see the brilliance that is so readily apparent to you. You want your spouse to pick the damn socks off the floor…
But think about it. Where would this change come from? If they don’t already have it in them, where would this come from?
If you’re lucky, the change you want to see is already a part of them but they just don’t know it. “Of course, I want nothing more to please you. I never knew you wanted the damn socks off the floor. If I had only known, I would have taken care of this all along.” “Well now that you mention it, I do really care what 4 out of 5 dentists say. Thanks for letting me know that they’re so passionately behind your widget!”
Sometimes that will happen. Sometimes all it takes is information. More often than not, you’re kidding yourself. They will not change because they are doing the things they are because of who and what they are. They cannot change that anymore than you can.
Sometimes the smartest thing to do is just to accept things as they are and walk away…
