You can’t make people want things.
I wish I’d found a more eloquent way to put this, but my basic point here is the hard-earned lesson that you can’t make anybody want to do anything.
No matter how important, deal-breaking, or serious the consequences for themselves or anybody else, you cannot make somebody want to change. I have lost entire relationships over refusals to change behaviour that just wasn’t tolerable. You probably have too. You can ask, draw boundaries, and create consequences, any of which might create a desire in someone to address a behaviour, but as the saying goes, change is an inside job.
It took a while to arrive at this truth myself. Like many people who end up in professions like coaching, I’ve always had some trait — interest, empathy or whatever it is — that encourages people to open up, combined with a disposition naturally inclined towards trying to understand human behaviour.
In the past, that’s looked like everything from deep & meaningfuls with friends, to adults dumping problems way above my paygrade on me, to sitting on the stairs with a sobbing stranger at a house party at 4 am.
Thankfully, a career as a coach has given me the opportunity to hone these traits into skills that have some use, for the people who want them.
Key point.
I’m now in the still shockingly excellent position of having people turn up, specifically seeking change, and invested in making it real. They show up month after month, making those sometimes awkward or painful steps towards embedding new patterns. And it works. When people truly commit to addressing the challenges in their lives, the movement they can make is breathtaking.
On the flip side, I’ve often had the experience of feeling that I’m not much more than a warm, nodding body for someone to vent at, with individuals much more committed to maintaining their problems than to seeking any solution to them. I’ve witnessed people trot their problems out for a daily walk like a prize pet - and realised that rather than resolution, they were actually invested in the problem itself, as a source of identity, attention or sympathy.
I’m not in that business anymore.
Change is genuinely hard. From what I see, it’s hardest in our closest relationships. We might be able to turn the ship at work, but try spend a weekend with your family without some iteration of your teenage self joining you. Try disrupt an imbalance in a relationship, once the inertia has set in. That’s hard.
Sometimes the pattern we’re in has to become so unbearable that change feels if not better, then at least no longer avoidable.
However, the point here, once again, is that you can’t make someone want to do any of this, no matter how important it is. It’s easier not to, at least in the short term. You can’t make someone want to address an addiction, or abusive behaviours, or self-sabotage or anything else. You can ask and exert what influence you can, but there’s a limit. If someone decides to change something it’s because they want to for themselves.
Where does that leave us? With a pretty limited set of choices really. We can ask. We can create boundaries. We can create consequences. In the end, we only get two: accept things as they are, whatever that is, or distance ourselves.
The basic point, trite as it is, is that you cannot change anyone else, only yourself (and even then, not always that much, but that’s a separate story). When it comes to other people’s behaviour, you’ve got a short set of options, and that’s it. You don’t get to decide how other people act.
Now while this truth might feel frustrating and limiting in your own relationships, it is also the frayed thread by which my faith in humanity is dangling.
Let me explain.
The reason I haven’t entirely given up hope, witnessing any one of the injustices unfolding in front of our eyes at any moment, is for exactly the same reason: because you can’t make people want things.
In the collective, this means things like:
You can’t make women want to be controlled.
You can’t make anybody want to be discriminated against.
You can’t make anybody want war, or genocide, or poverty, or any of the countless atrocities that we witness every time we scan social media.
Basically, you can’t make people ok with things they’re not ok with.
Sure, you can prey on people’s fears, incite mistrust or hatred, fuel division and so on. We see that every day, and it’ll work on some people. But not on everyone.
You can also, with enough illegitimate power, force through unjust and harmful laws or policies.
For a while.
But the clock will always run out on strategies like these, simply because you can’t make people want them. Some people might want those conditions for others, but they don’t want it for themselves. Nobody does. And the people affected don’t stop resisting until things change.
I’ll take the example of women, as it’s the one most central to my work. If women honestly believed in their hearts that they were inferior to men, then there would be a quiet acceptance of patriarchy. The same applies to every group that’s been placed on the lower rungs of the hierarchies we’ve created. As frightening as the current crackdowns on women’s rights are, from the US to Afghanistan, imagine if women agreed.
That scenario would be very different.
I’m not denying that there are plenty of women who, consciously or unconsciously, uphold the patriarchy - we’re all raised in it after all. (A recent report from the UN found that a depressing 9 out of 10 people worldwide hold a “fundamental bias” against women.) And yet… things are changing.
The tide has turned, however slowly, in many areas, and while there’s plenty of push back, it’s not coming from women. For the most part, women are not opting out of education, or employment, or leadership or property ownership, or any of the areas they kicked a door in to access. Most women are doing their best, within the confines of their reality, to build as much security and fulfilment as they can. It’s not women on podcasts urging other women to be “submissive”, as if that’s our natural state. (If you harbour any illusion that women are naturally submissive, spend an afternoon with a female toddler. That’ll cure you). Women are leaving relationships when they have to, climbing out of the dating pool altogether if they feel they need to for their safety or peace.
My point here again, is you can’t make women want patriarchy. Some do, and I guess good luck to them. But you cannot make most women want to be treated as less than. Or any other group for that matter.
I come from Ireland, and in my lifetime I’ve watched the all-pervasive power of the Catholic Church crumple in on itself almost overnight, after one scandal too many. I’ve witnessed people here campaign for decades - genuinely decades - for reform of abortion legislation that has literally killed women. I’ve celebrated as we became the first country to legalise marriage equality by popular vote. I’ve watched norms slide, consciousness grow, and tolerance deepen in this once most conservative island.
This gives me hope.
When it comes to social change, one of my favourite expressions is “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube”. There is no argument you could make to persuade a woman who believes in her own equality to want a relationship with a misogynistic man. She’ll choose solitude over that, as many women do.
There are no arguments that would convince my father that his little grandson is worth more than his granddaughter. There’s nothing you could say to make him want any of his children to stay in an unsafe marriage, or to make him ok with risk to their health or lives from legislation controlling women’s healthcare. There’s no combination of words that would work on him. That ship has sailed.
I’ve asked many Irish people, out of interest, if they’d like to return to the Ireland of the 1980s. I’m usually met with a perplexed look that I’d ask such a stupid question, but in the interest of hearing people's thoughts, I do. I’ve yet to hear a single yes, from anyone of any age, of any gender. As Dublin comedian David O’Dogherhty says about Christian Nationalism: “We have it a really good go here in Ireland - we really did, and it was SHITE”.
Hear, hear.
This maddening truth about personal growth may be what ultimately releases us from some of the worst constructions of humanity.
Or at least I hope so.
