Recently I heard someone say, “You become like the five people you spend the most time with.” That idea has captured my thinking the past few days, and two questions have surfaced:
I spend the most time with my wife. We have our own unique personalities, but thirty-four years of marriage has us finishing each other’s sentences and responding to things the same way. Our interests have merged over the years, while we still have our unique areas of focus. In a healthy relationship that’s a good thing.
I also spend a lot of time around people I work with, friends at church, and members of a small group that meets regularly. As I’ve thought about it, I do see how we’ve rubbed off on each other. We carry hints of the “scent” of each other’s lives.
Those changes haven’t been intentionally crafted but seem to just happen as we spend time together.
So if the statement is true, it leads to two more questions:
The Power of Influence
I’ve realized that I choose not to spend much time with people who are trying to change me. If they take me on as a project to “fix,” I don’t respond well. But when they simply enter my life and accept me unconditionally, I become a different person because of their influence. Without my realizing it, their acceptance influences me to become like them.
That’s why it’s important to be intentional about who we hang out with. It’s comfortable to connect with people who are just like us, but we don’t change or grow. To really stretch and develop as a person, we need to intentionally choose close relationships with people who are further ahead in certain areas of life.
In other words, find people of all ages whom you admire and want to be like, and hang out with them.
What happens in those relationships? They’re not giving you formal instruction or walking you through a curriculum; they’re just being themselves while you watch them in different life situations. Without even realizing it, you’re learning how to handle those situations in your own life. They model effectiveness for you.
They’re not forcing you to change; they’re influencing you. You become different by being around them.
Think back over the years to the people who inspired you to be better—to do something you didn’t think you could do, or to aim higher than you would have on your own. It might have been a teacher, a coach, a grandparent, or a family friend. Somehow, they made you believe in yourself. They came alongside when you were struggling and said, “I believe in you.”
How did that feel?
Maybe you had a painful childhood and weren’t given the nurturing you deserved. Today you still feel the bondage of those early defective relationships. When someone finally believed in you, that person probably stands out in your memory like a shaft of sunlight breaking through storm clouds. They may not even know it, but their presence in your life made a difference. They didn’t put together a formal course of instruction. They just came close enough to influence you.
That carries over into all of our relationships. People are watching us, whether we know it or not. The closer we are, the more they will pick up what they see. How we handle life situations influences how they handle life situations.
You Can’t Force Change
My wife Diane loves hydrangeas. They’re a striking flower that grows in spheres of color, usually shades of pink or white. They can also be a beautiful shade of blue—but not naturally.
Diane wanted blue flowers. She had two alternatives for trying to make that happen:
It’s true with any type of gardening. We can’t force things to grow, but we can influence their growth with water, nutrients, cultivation, and other forms of care. If we provide the right environment, there’s a lot better chance of healthy growth.
Relationships are the same way. We can’t force people to change. The more we try, the more frustrated we’ll become.
President Dwight Eisenhower was once asked what he believed about motivating people. He picked up a string that was sitting on his desk and tried to push it ahead of his fingers, but it obviously didn’t work. His fingers moved first, and the string followed. He pointed out that if you try to push people ahead, it leads to frustration.[3] The only way to motivate others is to go in front and provide an example, and they will often follow.
It’s not our job to fix other people. But we often find ourselves trying to do exactly that, and it’s frustrating when they don’t cooperate.
So, what is our job?
Many books on relationships talk about protecting ourselves from the weaknesses of others, setting boundaries, and keeping our distance. There is definitely a place for that perspective, because we can’t be victims of another person’s dysfunction. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make a difference. The Bible talks a lot about influencing others, which means they stay on our radar. We can’t force them to change, but we can seek to influence them. The issue isn’t how they respond; the issue is how we treat them.
It’s a threefold perspective:
Expectations vs. Expectancy
Sharon has always had a painful relationship with her father. Though he never verbalized his displeasure, her brothers always seemed to get his attention and focus while she had to make an effort to be recognized. She felt like an “unavoidable delay” in his schedule. Now, as an adult, Sharon struggles with how to relate appropriately to her father. They’ve never been close, but she feels obligated to fix the relationship and “make it all better.” Unfortunately, the more she tries, the more disappointed she becomes in his responses.
Should she just give up? Should she keep trying, hoping that something will happen? Should she do it out of guilt, knowing that she’s supposed to “honor her father”?
Our expectations get us in trouble. When a relationship is unhealthy, we often try to rescue it. The closer the relationship, the more we hope it will improve. But if I make it my mission to change you, I’m setting myself up for disappointment. It messes with my emotional set point if you don’t do what I’m expecting, and the emotions follow. Expectations always lead to pain when they’re not met.
A healthier perspective is to come with expectancy rather than expectations. With expectancy, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can be honest about my concerns and acknowledge my desire to have the person change, but I’m not demanding that things have to turn out a certain way. I don’t know how things will turn out.
Instead, I’m watching to see what happens, being sensitive to changes that I might overlook. That person may never change, and the relationship may never be healed. But if I can view things realistically, I’m building a foundation for how to make choices in that relationship—no matter what happens.
We Have a Choice
Our brain tends to run on autopilot. Things happen between us and others, and we rarely stop and think through the healthiest way to respond. Our default reaction is to “fix” what seems to be broken instead of to “influence.”
When you think of the people who have had the greatest impact in your life, what percentage of them had an agenda for you and what percentage had influence? While both may be factors, it’s probably weighted on the side of influence.
We need to become intentional about influencing others. It allows us to take responsibility for our side of a relationship, while giving others the freedom to make their own choices. It’s hard to influence a relationship and push our own agendas at the same time. When we consciously influence, we put ourselves in a position where we have to give up forcing the other person to change.
When I think about the people who have influenced me, I realize that none of them had an agenda to change me. They simply cared enough to get close, and I was able to observe their lives firsthand. As a result, I became a different person.
John Adair was my youth pastor when I was in high school. His hobby was rebuilding old pianos. I was fascinated with music and expressed an interest in what he was doing. So he invited me to spend time with him in his garage, working alongside him to learn the skills of construction, finishing, tuning, and maintenance. I learned about pianos from his knowledge, but I learned about life from our relationship. At a time when I was facing the uncertainty that teenagers feel about life, John believed in me. I can’t pinpoint a lot of specific things he said, but I remember how I felt when I received his affirmation. When I couldn’t believe in myself, I borrowed belief from him. He didn’t force me; he influenced me—and much of who I am today came from that relationship.
Influence means living a healthy emotional life in close proximity to others. It means that we intentionally put ourselves in relationships where we can be life on life with them. My friend Jim refers to it as “rubbing fur” with others. We don’t have to have an agenda; we just have to care enough to connect.
We shouldn’t place expectations on those relationships, because then we would become discouraged when people don’t respond properly. But we can have expectancy, knowing that our influence in their lives will have some type of impact. We might not see how that impact displays itself, but we can be certain it will occur.
Balancing Hope and Realism
We want people to change, especially the crazy ones. Everything inside us wants them to be different. They’ve thrown us off our emotional set point, and we wonder if our emotions will ever get back in balance.
It’s a fine line between two ends of a continuum:
Both ends can exist together, which is why it’s possible to keep from being thrown too far from our emotional set point. When we’ve tried so many times to impact people’s lives with no results, it’s easy to give up. Realism acknowledges that it might not get better.
But no matter how bad it gets, there’s always hope.
Brad and Linda have a twenty-five-year-old son who is the source of their pain. Their son has chosen a path that goes against the values and priorities they tried to instill in him, which strains their relationship. Conversation is shallow when they get together, and he seems to be making no progress in finding direction and purpose in his life. They pray for him, stay in contact with him, but have pretty much given up hope. To keep their sanity, they have accepted the fact that things probably won’t change.
If they believe their son will always follow the same path, it’s a realistic perspective to protect their emotions. But it’s also realistic to know that God loves their son as much as they do (more, actually). They might be out of fuel, but God isn’t.
That doesn’t mean the son is going to change. It simply means that God hasn’t given up and will be intimately involved with him throughout his whole life. Brad and Linda might not have reason to expect change in their son’s future, but they can trust God to always be working in his life.
That’s the difference between expectation and expectancy. With expectation, we’re waiting for something specific that we want to happen, and we’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t. With expectancy, we release our own agenda in a person’s life, allowing changes to happen that we can’t control.
We can’t be the quarterback of another person’s life. But we can be members of his team, supporting and influencing him to become a better life player.