Tutoring·
I think changing anything about yourself takes three steps, and only three.
You notice it needs to change. You want it to change. Then you keep wanting it, and stay open, for as long as it takes.
That is the whole list. What makes it hard is that the steps look almost identical from the outside, and almost nobody gets past the first one.
Step one is not step two
For years I ate a great deal of ice cream.
I was told what too much sugar does: diabetes, ageing, skin, eyes. I did not argue with any of it. I filed it under true, but not about me, because I was not gaining weight, and weight was the only evidence I was checking.
That is step one without step two. Knowing a thing is bad for you and wanting to stop are two different states, and people mix them up constantly, in themselves and in other people. Plenty of people will tell you they know they should stop something. Ask whether they want to and the answer is often no, not really.
The wanting has to survive failing
Then, over time, enough people told me it was genuinely bad that I did want to stop. And I could not.
The reason I could not is that it was never really about ice cream. My neck, shoulders and back hurt, and eating something cold and sweet dulled it for a few minutes. That was the point of it.
What followed was a loop. The relief lasted as long as the spoon. Afterward my body felt worse than before, and a body that feels worse takes the mood down with it, and a lower mood sent me back for more. Every round of it made the next round more likely.
I stayed there for a long time. Wanting to change did not get me out. I want to be clear about that, because this is the part where advice usually promises something it cannot deliver.
Step three is not magic
I do not think wanting something hard enough makes it appear.
What wanting does is keep the question open, and an open question changes what you notice and what you agree to. Eventually someone brought me something that worked, and I stopped wanting the ice cream. Now I walk past the shop on a hot day, tired, and it does not occur to me.
The part that mattered was not luck. It was that I was still looking when it turned up. Somebody who has decided the thing is impossible hears the same suggestion, shrugs, and never finds out.
The answer usually comes through a person
When I was small I wanted my teacher to favour me. She plainly had favourites, and I was not one of them.
Eventually she did.
It was only in my thirties that I found out my parents had quietly seen to it. What had looked to a child like a wish being granted was two adults doing something I could not see.
I think that is usually the shape of it. The answer arrives through people: a parent, a friend, someone at a table who mentions what worked for them. Which is another reason step three is not about waiting. Whoever is going to bring you the answer has to be somewhere you can be reached.
Children work the same way
A child who has decided he is not a maths child is not lazy. He is stuck between step one and step two: he knows the situation and has stopped wanting it to be different, usually because someone convinced him it could not be.
Get him wanting again and he will find his own way through the rest of it. That is most of what teaching is.
None of this is fast. But it is only three steps, and the third one costs nothing except refusing to close the question.