How do you have conversations that are actually about understanding, rather than subtly trying to manipulate someone into changing?

Understanding someone, rather than subtly trying to
manipulate them to change, asks you to develop one
of the highest relation skills a human can develop,
and it invites you to become someone who embodies
this strangely paradoxical truth:

You genuinely love and accept this person exactly as they are.
And at the same time, you want evolution and growth.

Embodying this paradox asks you to develop two traits:

The first is to stop making your liberation contingent
on other people's liberation, and recognize this:

When you feel a strong urge to force someone to change,
it is often not about them. It is a symptom of your own fear
that you are not fully becoming who you want to be,
that you are not faithfully walking the path of your own soul.
So you begin to need someone else's evolution to guarantee
your happiness.

When you know in your bones that you are on the path
that is true for you, when you are taking aligned
action and telling the truth with your life, your need
for other people to change softens dramatically.
You can rest your head on the pillow at night with peace,
knowing you are responsible for your own liberation,
and you are meeting that responsibility.

The second requirement is honest feedback paired with
infinte curiosity.

Relationships do not thrive when we hide our desire for change;
they thrive when we own it clearly.

If you pretend you only want to understand someone, while secretly
hoping they will evolve, consciously or not, they will feel it.
Their nervous system will register threat, and they become less
available for change, not more.

So instead, name both sides clearly.

Own the places where you want something to be different.
Admit how that desire may be connected to your own fears,
your own longings, your own unfinished edges. And at the same
time, share what you genuinely see as possible for them, for you,
and for the relationship.

From this place, curiosity becomes real. It's not a tactic or
a disguise for control, pretending to be curious when actually
you're dying on the inside needing change. It's a curiosity that
is alive, open, and unafraid of what it might discover.

The art is holding both of these truths at once:

I love you exactly as you are, and I can do that because
my liberation is my responsibility.

And I see what is possible for you and for us, and I want
to create that together.

Conversations rooted in this paradox become rich and nuanced.
They stop being about control and coercion and start being about creation.

Flynn Skidmore
Art: Eloy Bida