REVISION
Changing Others' Attitudes (Revision of Inner Speech)
To change another person's attitude or behavior towards you or themselves, you must first change your internal imaginal activity concerning them. Instead of…
Step by step
- Identify the undesirable attitude or behavior of another person.
- In your imagination, represent that person to yourself as already having the desired attitude or being in the desired state (e.g., gainfully employed, kind, appreciative).
- Engage your senses: hear their voice saying what you want to hear, feel their presence, see them as you wish them to be.
- Remain faithful to this assumption, ignoring the current facts of the senses.
- Persist in this imaginal act, knowing it will harden into fact and cause them to respond in kind.
Related Bible passages
Related ideas
No Other Gods
To change another person's attitude or behavior towards you or themselves, you must first change your internal imaginal activity concerning them. Instead of reacting to their current undesirable behavior, you 'represent' them to yourself as already embodying the desired state or attitude. This internal change, persisted in, will cause them to reflect that change in the outer world.
So, I hear something of a friend of mine. He is unemployed. So, he’s unemployed – that’s the fact. Well, am I really free? If I am really free from the tyranny of Egypt – free from the house of bondage, having heard what I heard, I will now represent him to myself as gainfully employed. Now, the facts deny it, but I will remain faithful to my assumption as though it were true, confident that imagining creates reality, and therefore, if I persist in my assumption, it will harden into fact. ... So, we have that in Scripture: “We love Him, because He first loved us” (I John 4:19). Our love of God is response. Well, your love of any one is response, unless you know what you are doing and you set it up in motion. And, so, if you want some one to respond, you have to start it first. So, she started it with him – Leonidov and to this day – of course, she hasn’t worked there in years – but to this day when we go back, if we go to the Music Hall, he is all praise and joy. He could not be nicer and, yet, for eleven years he was, in her eyes, the devil!
This technique is based on the law that the outer world is a reflection of the inner world ('yourself pushed out'). Others' responses are a reaction to your own internal state and assumptions about them. By initiating the desired feeling or assumption within, you cause the external change.