Changing Others By Changing Yourself

I had a fascinating experience at the one day Personal Development ET workshop.

There was a person who did something about "asking people for money after services rendered" (presumably counselling/healing sessions).

He was having trouble locating a direct sensation in his body so to help him (this is in group work) I picked up his blue clipboard and said, "I'm gonna head out the door with that and you call me back and tell me I haven't paid for it, ok?"

Now bear in mind, I'm not giving this much attention as I'm supervising everyone really and have my mind on the totality of the training in the context of everyone there.

So I go to the door, he calls to me, "Excuse me!" I turn around, look at him, an eyebrow raised automatically and a "What??" attitude, quite spontaneously generated as a response to his tone, and he says, "You haven't paid for that." My response was to look from the clipboard to him and experiencing a sense of, why should I? Why should I pay for THAT you strange person?!

A little while later I thought to make the rounds and test and check on people's work. Go to the clipboard man again, pick it up, go to the door. "Excuse me." I turn around, surprised. He says, "You haven't paid for that." and I just said, again entirely spontaneously, "Oh, I'm so sorry ..." before snapping out of it and getting meta to the whole role play.

Now, for me that was quite an extraordinary experience. Same man, same clipboard, exactly the same "me" on both occasions but I can't begin to convey how *different* it was both times. It was a completely different situation and experience from my angle, although the words were the same and I couldn't really tell any change in his voice or anything.

I think that was probably the first time ever that I had been on the receiving end of someone *changing their attitude* in a situation somehow and felt personally how *different* my instinctive, reflexive response was to the situation and the man.

Ladies and gentlemen, when you change YOURSELF using ET, you are creating a whole new set of experiences directly for the people around you, a different reality altogether. Now I know "they" all say that we can make people respond to us differently by changing ourselves but I really didn't quite get that as profoundly as I did in this exercise. If you want people to start treating you differently, try some ET on the most common patterns and see what happens. If your results are half as good as this person's, then people will behave completely differently towards you even if you change *nothing else* about yourself, not your tone of voice, not what you say or what you look like.

Spooky but profound experience that was.

Silvia

09 August 2002