I don't know about encouraging someone else but here is what worked for me (I have not smoked in almost ten years): 1) being mentally ready to stop. It took me a few years of telling myself it was time to think about quitting smoking before I did it. It was a long process of getting psyched up for it. 2) picking a day to stop. Obviously, you don't want to pick a date during a time that you know will be stressful. I picked March 6 simply because I dreamt one night that I quit on March 6. It was an ordinary weekday. It was a random choice. 3) taking one day, one hour, one minute at a time. For a long, long time, I simply told myself and others that "I am not smoking right now". At the time, it was too daunting for me to say that I had quit smoking. 4) Use a stop smoking aid. I used nicorette gum because it comes closest to mimicking smoking (put something in the mouth, getting a bit of a hit of nicotine, chewing the gum for about 10 minutes and then discarding it). However, I did not adhere to the instructions and use it for only 3 months. I tapered much more gradually and used the gum for about 18 months or so. Mind you, towards the end of that period, I was using about one-half a piece once or twice a day. 5) Finding other ways to reward yourself about finishing a tough job, having an difficult or emotional conversation or whatever triggers your feeling of entitlement to a cigarette as a reward. I ended up buying myself flowers with some of the money I was saving from not smoking. 6) Understand that you will feel at a loss at first in certain situations (e.g. having a drink, writing, balancing your checkbook, having a coffee,etc.) You will find yourself reaching for where you kept your cigarettes and then be dismayed to find there are none there. Be aware of this and try to talk yourself out of panicking. This reaction is part of the habit of smoking. Just tell yourself that the cigarettes aren't there because you are not smoking right now, you don't need really need to smoke now. 7) I had to keep a new, unopened package of cigarettes in my office and at home just so that I could tell myself that if things got too bad, I had access to cigarettes. This may not work for all, but I needed to do this to given myself permission to fail and then to try stopping again. What ended up happening was that I did not think I had not encountered a situation that made me want to give up what I had accomplished by not smoking. This feeling grew stronger as time went on. I eventually started to enjoy feeling liberated from cigarettes; the need to go outside in all kinds of lousy weather, being anxious that I would be a few minutes late for something because I had to stop to have a cigarette and so on. I still have the unopened pack of cigarettes in my office. A friend broke into my pack at home and took it with him. Stopping smoking is not an event so much as a process. Best wishes.