Now that I have your attention, you can not make someone stop smoking.
You can get angry with them
You can get sad and cry about it
You can threaten them
You can admonish them
You can shame them
You can criticize them
You can blame them for their ill health
You can tell them how stupid it is
But they have done this to themselves for years. It won’t help for you to add to the mental dialog they already have going on every day. Mostly it makes them more frustrated at the problem they have not been able to solve. They get mat at you and mad at themselves. So they push the anger down (not really) by having a cigarette.
The problem is that you can not change anything you don’t like about another person. No one can. We have a hard enough time changing things we don’t like about ourselves. When you know how the mind works, you can stop trying to change others and concentrate on improving yourself. The change in your behavior influences other people around you. It’s like dropping a pebble in a pond. Your behavior, good or bad, ripples out to all the people who come in contact with you and influences their lives. You can only hope that they notice the change in you and begin to look at themselves and their behavior and decide to modify what they are doing.
Unless it is their idea and their desire to live a longer, healthier life they probably won’t be able to quit. The number one most effective reason to quit is so they can watch their children grow up and be a better example to them. Several clients have stopped because they have worked hard, sacrificed and are going to retire early and they don’t want to be sick or die before they can enjoy the fruits of their many years of labor. Some simply are tired of it: tired of the hassle, the smell, wasting all that money, etc.
Having said all of that, here is a typical story I think will help. The wife of a smoker said that her husband had told her he had quit. But she knew better. Still, she did not bug him because she had nagged him for years to quit and it only caused problems in their marriage so she stopped nagging and he kept smoking.
One evening as they were getting ready for bed he said he thought he had left the car unlocked and went downstairs “to lock the car”. When he came back, his wife could smell the smoke left on his clothing. She said nothing that night but the next morning she gently and cautiously asked “did you have a cigarette before you came to bed last night?” He admitted that he had. (He knew she knew.) She gently said “I could smell it on you”. And that was that. She did not continue the conversation.
Later in the week, (when he had had time to think about it) she gently asked him if he would go see a hypnotherapist to stop smoking and he said yes. He needed help. He could quit until he was in a social/business situation and then he would “bum” one from a colleague. He wondered why it was so hard for him to quit. The reason is that ONE bummed cigarette, that ONE puff. It only takes ONE puff and a smoker is back at it, every time.
By the time a smokers health is compromised, they begin (in error) to think “I might as well keep smoking, I’m done for anyway.”
Smokers avoid and ignore the elephant in the room because they think it is too big and they are too busy. So if you want to get someone to stop smoking, the best way to help is, gently and at the right time, present options for them. You do the research, discover the success rates of each option, then present the options with their success rates and the cost of treatment and let them mull it all over. You can do the research by simply “googling”. Don’t push, just offer.