Changing Others

[Nani]

Hi!

I've started to think about my relationships with other people. I just read one of Steve's articles and in it he talked about how your relationships with other people are really relationships with yourself. He cited an example of how Erin became more organized once he himself became more neat. One thing I got from this is that you can change people if you change yourself.

But then I remembered another article Steve wrote about how to help negative people, and one of the options was to lovingly let go of the person. And this tells me that you can't always change people. So I'm confused. To what extent can you change others?

This concerns me mostly because my brother is a heavy smoker and I want him to stop for the sake of his health. He has said that he intends to stop so I know he at least wants to. I thought that by being more committed to my goals he would be more committed to stopping, but this has not worked. So is this something that only he can stop for himself?