thought exercise on Changing Ourselves

Carl Jung, one of the early pioneers of modern psychology, wrote this from his years of experience as a therapist: The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of ...

It’s human nature to resist change—particularly when it comes in the form of adversity or challenges. But change is inevitable, and developing the trait of resilience helps us not only survive change,...

My friend Eugene has a black belt in martial arts. During a sermon taping, I once held a block of wood as tightly as I could, right in front of my face, while Eugene did a 360-degree spin and splinter...

An atheist fell off a cliff. As he tumbled downward, he caught hold of the branch of a small tree. There he hung between heaven above and the rocks a thousand feet below, knowing he wasn’t going to be...

The truth about significant soul transformation is this—change is possible, but it is harder than we want and takes longer than we expect…. real change requires more than willpower and easy, simple st...

On a daily basis we’re faced with two simple choices. We can either listen to ourselves and our constantly changing feelings about our circumstances, or we can talk to ourselves about the unchanging t...

There was a story going around about the Special Olympics. For the hundred-yard dash, there were nine contestants, all of them so-called physically or mentally disabled. All nine of them assembled at ...

What Determines Happiness?  Imagine a movie theater full of a hundred people. These hundred individuals represent the full continuum of happiness: Some are exceptionally happy, others less so, and ...

A mind is more like a pile of millions of little rocks than a single big boulder. To change a mind, we need to carry thousands of little rocks from one pile to another, one at a time. This is because ...

Core beliefs can be hard to change because they’ve generally been with us for a long time, and we assume that they’re true. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to changing our core beliefs is that they are s...

Is it not true that all of us are pilgrims, people without a fixed home, even if we have never had to leave home? Time flies, days go by, and we are ever in the process of changing, ever moving on. So...

We can “know” something to be true, and then find it is not true after all. I recall confidently assertive to a student that, of course, the name of the region Perea (to the east of the Dead Sea) appe...

Those who insist we are even more self-centered today might point to how the titles and focus of our popular magazines have shifted, as photographer Fred Ritchin notes: “I always use a quote by Paul S...

Our selves are fashioned; we are adorned with histories that incline us to saunter, swagger, or shuffle. Given our histories, some of us move through the world with a cape; some of us don baggy sweate...

Crises, and pressures for change, confront individuals and their groups at all levels, ranging from single people, to teams, to businesses, to nations, to the whole world. Crises may arise from extern...

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

I became interested in the subject of transition outer changes around 1970 when I was going through some difficult inner and outer changes. Although I gave up my teaching career because of those chang...

If you really want to change, it starts with your story. If you want to change the story of your life, you need to change the stories in your mind. So what story do you want to live? Do you want to ex...

The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...

Peter Drucker suggests that we should always sustain two streams of learning and self-improvement. And though he is speaking specifically about work and career, what he says is equally applicable whet...

George Garrett, a novelist and amateur boxer wrote about a transformation that often takes place for fighters who stick with the sport. Throughout their journey to boxing excellence, in which they mus...

Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself....

Why is change important? Why do we avoid it, even when it means experiencing much more pain staying stuck? Writer Ann Lammott explains: If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfort...

Context matters. According to the Terman Study, which followed one thousand study participants from childhood until their death, the people we surround ourselves with are who we become. We see those a...

The challenge each of these faced in their deconstruction—and what we may face—is walking the tightrope between becoming our own person and honoring our past. In The Homeless Mind , sociologist P...

All day long, all of us are framing and reframing our lives. We talk about the memory of our adorable but sexist grandpa. We label ourselves as movie critics or introverts or justice-lovers. We say th...

Editor’s Note: The following illustration came from one of my own sermons, as I was trying to help a congregation see itself not as a building, but the body of Christ. It has been adapted for TPW. No...

The Messy Middle In his classic work Transitions, author and professor William Bridges shares an excellent anecdote about life in crisis: it can happen at any time and in a myriad of ways. It also de...

There is a story—likely apocryphal—of Alexander the Great discovering a soldier asleep at his post, a grave offense. When the guard was brought before him, the king asked his name. “Alexander,” the yo...

Sociologist Ann Swidler has written persuasively about the difference between “settled” and “unsettled” times. Settled times consist of “traditions and common sense; [within which we] refine and reinf...