habits on Changing Ourselves

To change one’s life: start immediately,  Do it flamboyantly,  No exceptions.

The only person who likes change is a wet baby. –Mark Twain (Attributed) To Change or Not to Change, That is the Question When do we decide to change ? I’m not a Tony Robbins acolyte, but I do l...

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...

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 ...

Finding Grace in Lent The practice of Lent has become a place of grace for me over the last number of years. While some feel that Lent is a failure to recognize that our salvation is rooted in gr...

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is...

Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.

We become what we repeatedly do.

The power of changing a habit is identifying the reward you are seeking and working backward.

A 2014 study by Wendy Wood found that approximately 40% of people’s daily activities are performed out of habit. According to Wood, “an important characteristic of a habit is that it’s automatic…We fi...

Experience tells me that people's hearts are seldom changed if they are not changed when young. Seldom indeed are men converted when they are old. Habits have deep roots. Once sin is allowed to se...

As a writer, my great interest is human nature, and in particular, the subject of happiness. A few years ago, I noticed a pattern: when people told me about a “before and after” change they’d made tha...

For the past two weeks, the Strachan family has been living, working, and playing in Southern California, primarily at the beach, thanks to a close friend (yes, I know how ridiculously blessed we are)...

As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to ...

On retreat we stop avoiding the pain of the disconnect between our deepest desires and the way we are actually living. We have time and space to reflect on our life rhythms to see if they are really w...

We often get into ruts, on treadmills, caught up in patterns and habits that aren't useful. We don't stop to ask, what can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially bein...

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your d...

To experience the richness of life in God's kingdom, we must reorder our lives. We need to see through the shallow promises of our culture, and we need rhythms, signposts, and practices that reori...

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit.”.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

Because we are sinful by nature, we have developed sinful patterns, which we call habits. Discipline is required to break any habit. If a boy has developed the wrong style of swinging a baseball bat, ...

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

Our brains need to engage and make decisions again, instead of floating along the paths of least resistance.

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

Dan B. Allender, in his book Leading Character , notes that the Greek word “charaktér" was “used in connection with tools designed for engraving.” Greek philosophers noted that our past actions ...

My Aversion to Self-Help Books & Their Gurus but Why I Recommend This One! I am not one for “self-help” books. I know that I probably could use some more personal coaching advice, but… my habit ...

Ancient lighting took  Work I remember watching a movie (I think it was The Mummy ) where the protagonists descended into an underground structure built by the ancients. The structure was completel...

We sow a thought and reap an act; We sow an act and reap a habit; We sow a habit and reap a character; We sow a character and reap a destiny.