Internal and External Changes

[winkio]

The premise is that there are two types of interpersonal changes: changes that you cause to others, and changes that others cause to you.

The are two main ideas that are presented.  The first is that an external changer or strong willed person, a president, a general, a CEO, or some other sort of leader, would cause many changes in others while experiencing few changes themselves.  The second is that an internal changer or a weak willed person, such as an average joe working a desk job, is unable to cause changes in others while constantly being changed themselves.  There are a few well established analogies of this system (the worst of which is the shepherd/sheep analogy).

Here are my thoughts: while the external changers (CEOs, etc.) are generally viewed as the best way to go, I see the inability or reduced ability that many of them have to internal changes as a monumental deficit.  If you can't be changed by others, you are unable to learn or grow as a person, at least the way I see it.  Yet if you allow yourself to be changed too much or too often, you lose some ability to change others, similar to a substitution effect.

The question that has been bugging me is how to manage these two behaviors.  Is there a constant equilibrium point on the scale that is the most effective?  Are there multiple such points?  Or is an oscillatory cycle between internal and external behavior more effective?

[Blizzard]

I think a cycle would be the most effective. Fact is that people change constantly. Most people have no control over these changes, only few actively do change themselves into what they want. As you already noticed, external changers change only little and that is true. The difference between external and internal is mostly that the externals have stronger beliefs and that's why they can be changed harder. But the main problem is that externals sometimes have other character traits that are considered bad which prevent them from changing. e.g. Lots of people in power are stubborn which disallows them to change more. From what I see most people stay around a certain average degree. Externals change too little and internals change always jumping back and forth, "left and right", never forward.

For externals I realized that there is mostly no point in talking to them about it too much. They are too stubborn to admit that they are wrong when they clearly are. It would require way too much time and energy to make them see their way of errors. The easiest way to deal with them is to just ignore them and give them the illusion in their mind that the world is how they think it is.

For internals it's not much easier. Because they keep shifting their opinion so much, it's easier to feed them with a stable point of view. This required yet again a lot of time and energy. And the results aren't usually too good either as it goes probably on par with brainwashing. Even here you have the special category of stubborn ones.

My method for both is let them be. I may or may not give them my perspective, but generally I don't deal with them. I have gotten rid of all people in my life that are too much external or too much internal so I don't have to bother with them. While you're a kid and going to school, you don't have too much choice about the people that are in your life. But as you grow older, things change and basically you can decide who you want to have around you. So IMO the actual best way to deal with them is just to avoid them completely. They aren't worth it.