What About An Unwilling Person?

Have you ever tried to help someone with a problem and discovered that they were not about to use your help?

People can be funny sometimes but they can usually be relied on to need to come up with their own solutions. We can each be grateful for help, but unless we have some influence on the solution, that solution won't seem valuable.

If solving a problem requires changing an unwilling person, we might need to redefine the problem.

Unwilling people see the situation differently. Unwilling people need willingness before change becomes a possibility.

What if we could achieve that by asking them to define their problem? And, taking it a step farther, what if they rephrased that problem as a goal? Once we've made it that far, all kinds of collaborative possibilities emerge.

But jumping in with a solution, especially one that requires someone else to change, seldom works.

-- Doug Smith