Interpersonal paradox

Lesson learned from conversation in the middle of the night: If you want to change others, you have to change yourself. If you want to change yourself, you have to focus on how you treat others. It is when you focus on yourself that you are more likely to have problems with how other people's actions affect you.

I think most of us can identify examples of this at work in our own lives. If we are being mostly selfish, we tend to get bugged more easily by others. If we want to change them, we have to change how we interact with them, which changes us. Thus, I suppose it could even be reasoned that when we change someone else, we really are mostly making changes in ourselves and how we interact with those others. If they are to change, they are the one that has to do the changing. All we can do is inspire them by changing ourselves.

I suppose the statement above should really read something like "If you want to change yourself for the better, you best succeed when you focus on how you interact with and treat others." Yeah, I know, a bit nit-picky, but for accuracy's sake, I figured I would clarify a bit.

Anyway, this lead me to wonder how many other areas of life do we change by changing ourselves and our perceptions and interactions with the world around us rather making actual changes in that world.