As I get older, I'm finding that God seems to do an interesting thing when I pray that other people would be more this or that (a quality that I apparently think I already have.)
One of my personal pet peeves is stealing, so whenever I see evidence of employees or customers stealing and getting away with it, I always pray that God will bless them with a clean conscience (because in order to have a clean conscience, one's actions, in fact, must be also be clean.)
I don't know how or if it affects the ones I pray for, but I know that a peculiar thing always happens to me: I start noticing things like pens, sheets of paper, paper clips, etc. in my bag or car that came from work (and therefore, aren't really mine), and God convicts me to return them. I had once taken a bunch of rubber bands and used them at home, so God convicted me to buy a bag on my own and just put them in with the supplies at work.
Now I'm almost afraid to pray that anyone else would supposedly be "changed" into what I personally would want for them to be, because I know God is going to raise the bar for my own life as a result.
Instead, I find myself looking around for people I want to be like... and hoping that God will help me change enough to more like them.