Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

I have family and friends who are relatively well-off but don’t spend much time thinking intentionally about how to do good. So I’ve been wondering whether or how much to challenge them to do more good and take doing good more seriously.

For example, I’ve always given a percentage of my income to charity. I’ve got parents who are lovely people, but they donate basically not at all. It’s hard to know how to bring this up to them. They’re retired. They have a house and a summer house. They clearly have enough money. I’d love for them to answer the question of “How much should we be giving back?” I have the sense that they haven’t actually thought about it, so the default decision is to do nothing.

And especially with people in my generation, it feels uncomfortable to talk about this. I don’t want it to feel accusatory or make people defensive. I want people to make an affirmative decision they’re happy about and not have it live in the ambient guilt zone. How can I bring it up in a way that makes clear I just want people to be actively making a decision, even if it’s not the same as mine?

Dear Do-gooder,

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” the 20th-century psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote.

I think the same is true about changing other people. Start by accepting them just as they are, and you may find they’re a lot more receptive to what you say.

It sounds like you’re not trying to shove your own ideological commitments down your family and friends’ throats, and I think that’s great. But I’d encourage you to go even further.

Rogers’ insights are helpful here. Contrary to the views of other psychologists, Rogers didn’t think it took any special therapy for a person to change for the better. He believed that just a few conditions were necessary: The person has to feel that you view them with unconditional positive regard — that you like and accept them as they are, not only if they change in this or that way. The person also has to feel that you’re able to truly empathize — that you understand how things feel to them from within their own internal frame of reference.

Meet those conditions, Rogers said, and the person will naturally move toward greater consistency between their values and actions, becoming healthier and more integrated.

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