The Only Behaviour You Control Is Your Own

“Some of us love the idea of changing other people, and spend excessive amounts of time and energy trying to do just that, getting angry, upset or frustrated if they don’t change.”

Learning to process behaviour, your own and that of those around you, in the moment, is not easy. And, if you’re honest, are you happy with your behaviour? All of the time? What about other people’s? What about that driver who cut you up at the lights the other day, and that idiot from Accounts?

Martin Humphries is a man familiar with bad behaviour – his own (at times), and that of everybody else (of course) – and admits he was of the opinion it was everybody else who needed to change to make his life better, and not he himself.

Recognising that his behaviour was not always doing him any favours, and conscious of behaviour he admired in others, he made it his ambition to better manage what were often split-second reactions to people and events, for good or for bad. As a consequence, he came to the realisation: the only behaviour we can actually control is our own.

“But is abandoning our need to change everybody else, and learning to control our own behaviour, the fix for everything?”