Most people in conflict are focused on what they want the other person to do. What they want the other person to understand. And how they want the other person to behave or change their behaviour.

So here’s a question: what do you control? And here’s the painful answer. You can control your own behaviour and that’s about it. You can’t control your own thoughts or feelings. And you can’t control the behaviour of others. Let me say that again: you can control your own behaviour. You can’t control your thoughts or feelings and you can’t control other people. And yes this sucks. I know! My life would be a lot easier if I could control other people too. But the science is clear on this. thoughts and feelings come from our survival brain. And that's not a system that you have direct control over.

You have more control, not unlimited, just more control over your own actions because it’s governed by your frontal lobe. I know, the world tells you that "if you just say it in the right way, at the right time, in the right tone then you can make other people change". But that's misinformation and I’m sorry you've been told this lie, because that’s not how human brains work. This isn’t my opinion and, frankly, I wish we could control people too… but this is the science.

And yet, even though this is the part we have the least amount of control over, we often get focused on what we want other people to do, what we want other people to understand, and what we want other people to believe. It’s totally normal to want to control other people. Sometimes people do harmful things, sometime to us and sometime to others, of course we would want to control other people. This is a very normal human thing to want. Why? Because Humans are great at controlling the external environment. That’s why I’m here in a heated building with running water and electricity. and so our brains trick us into thinking it’s also possible to control other people and so we get fixated on changing other people. But it’s a lie.

So, although that is a very normal human thing to do, it's actually going to make you feel powerless, because other people often don't do what we ask them to do. They don't do the things that we told them that they should do. They don’t change the way we told them to change.

And so if you've never asked somebody to change their behavior, you certainly can and should ask for what you need. But if you asked somebody like 110 times to change their behavior, and they still aren’t changing, this is not because you aren’t trying hard enough, this is because you, like everyone else, don't have the ability to control other people. There aren't some magic words you can say that always gives you control over other people's behavior. I’m a psychologist and I can’t force people to change when they don’t want to change. I can only help people change once they’ve decided they want to change!

So, the real trick here, based on science, is to focus on the thing you have the most amount of control over: your behaviour. if you focus on your own behavior, you're going to feel way more empowered than if you're trying to control other peoples behavior.