“Live and Learn” Week Five

Influence others, and don’t

try to change them!

Happy July 4th!

Today we conclude our

June message series.

We’ve talked about basic life lessons, or processes of decision-making, that successful people learn, whether in their personal life, in their professional life, or in their spiritual life. Week 1 was: “Know yourself so to be yourself.” Week 2: “Embrace short-term pain for long-term gain.” Week 3: “Be the hero, not the victim.” Week 4: “Life works from the inside out.” You can always catch the encores of our messages by going to our website, and scrolling down to past messages. To conclude, we are looking at how we can influence others. Most of us from time to time have desired to change another person. It could be your spouse’s habits, or your kids’ bad behaviors, or the way a coworker does his job that is the wrong way to do things. We think sometimes that our influence is so great that we can actually change other people’s character
faults. However, our problem is that if the other person often doesn’t change, that leads us to become angry, frustrated, or doubt ourselves. An important life lesson is to understand the
difference between influence and change. You and I cannot change someone; we can only influence them to change. Successful people don’t fall into the trap of thinking we can change other people; but on the other hand, our influence can be much greater than we sometimes think.