100 Ways To Motivate Yourself, Third Edition

80. Change yourself first

Don’t change other people. It doesn’t work. You’ll waste your life trying. Many of us spend all our time trying to change the people in our lives. We think we can change them in ways that will make them better equipped to make us happy. This is especially true of our children. We talk to our children for hours about how we think they should change. But children don’t learn from what we say. They learn from what we do. Today’s children, upon hearing us talk to them about how they should change, will often say, “Yeah, right.” It’s shorthand for “I’m not listening to what you say, I’m listening to what you do.”

Gandhi was especially tuned in to the futility of changing other people. Yet Gandhi was probably responsible for ...