Instead of naming the negative trait you want someone to stop, describe them in the positive terms you want them to embody — treat them as already being the person you hope they'll become, and they tend to rise to it.
In a Lex Fridman conversation with Kanye West (Ye), Lex repeatedly frames Ye as a "great man," a "samurai," and someone with "love in his heart," instead of labeling the antisemitic remarks he was pushing back on. A breakdown of the interview calls this "arguably the strongest thing in this entire video" and credits it with directly producing Ye's apology, timing the framing immediately before Ye offers one.
Quote: "you have the skill and the capacity to really add love to the world and I hope you do that but I can tell you're a man that has love in his heart."
Hughes's The Cognitive Dissonance Identity-Installation Formula elaborates this into a full six-step scripted sequence — identity statements, a personality-inventory question, negative dissociation, an article citation for third-party authority, negative off-casting (criticizing an absent third party to imply the target's opposite virtue), and a closing introduction that has a third party hear the new identity named aloud. It also supplies the theoretical grounding (Festinger's cognitive dissonance, the backfire effect) for why an assigned reputation sticks better than an argued-for one.
Из тем: Conversation Craft: Listening, Rapport & Room-Reading