“When we compare ourselves to one another, we will always feel inadequate or resentful of others.”

-Bonnie L. Oscarson

It’s a common thing for us to go to church, meetings, parties, or watch well-put-together people on TV dressed in their “Sunday best”, smiling and talking and visiting, sharing their thoughts to probing questions, interacting with others professionally, confidently, sounding like they know what they’re doing, and to walk away with a very false impression of everyone else but ourselves.

We see the relative perfection of others’ lives and know quite intimately our own glaring imperfections. We see what others seem to be, but know with laser-like precision all our own hidden parts.

But think about what we know others don’t know about our inner demons and personal struggles, our private insecurities, challenging circumstances, painful histories, and hidden weaknesses.

We all have them. Even though we are only clearly aware of our own, they exist in the darkened shadows of everyone’s else’s lives as well, shadowed from our external line-of-sight. But our personal character and personality issues walk with dirty shoes all over the carpeted living rooms of our own lives, glaringly obvious to our look in the proverbial mirror.

Under such circumstances, we can feel like we just don’t measure up, like our church lives are facades, all fictionalized story, an unworthy play acted on a stage where everyone else is real and authentically out of our league.

We would be mistaken to assume too much.

What’s Behind Your Door?

Behind every door are some set of challenges hardly anyone else knows about. Doors are locked, not only to keep strangers out, but often to keep our secrets in. Not that everyone should be wearing their sins and insecurities on their sleeves, but it does present a false impression that can leave us feeling like we’re the only broken china on the shelf.

Behind every door are some combination of insecurities, sins and temptations, addictions and anxieties, mistakes and regrets and one or another disorder. Some live with chronic pain and others live with failing memories. Some struggle under the weight of depression and others feel trapped in their anxiety. Some are unhappy with their relationships and others are unhappy with themselves.

Where one person struggles with debilitating perfectionism, another struggles with loneliness. While one is filled with regret, another is crippled by fear. Some are struggling with testimonies or temptations and others are struggling to know God has forgiven their past sins. Some are taking care of sick parents while others are sick themselves and don’t know how to tell their families just how sick they are.

We’re all mixes of pride and humility, selfishness and selflessness, kindness and resentment, generosity and greed, compassion and judgment, forgiveness and grudges. The problem is that we usually don’t see the pride and selfishness, anger and greed in the hearts or minds of others. But we sure see and feel our own! And so we’re stuck making the only comparisons possible—false comparisons.

Life is Messy

The point I’m trying to make is just to say, welcome to life! Life is dirty and messy, difficult and challenging. It hurts and sometimes hurts quite a bit and for way too long. But make no mistake about it; we are all broken, just broken in different places and in different ways and to different degrees. Some breaks are on the surface and some are under the skin, in places only God can see.

But we’re all flawed and incomplete. The question is whether we are giving ourselves the grace we would give others with the same challenges.

Probably not.

My best guess is that most of us tend to be kinder with others’ weaknesses than our own. But Christ atoned, bled and was resurrected for all of us, not just for all of them!  

Thomas S. Monson once told the story of a woman who thought poorly of her neighbor’s dirty laundry drying on a clothesline until she realized she was looking at the laundry through the dirty lens of her own unwashed windows.

That lesson has powerful application inwardly as well. Too often we evaluate ourselves as we look inward through a foggy mirror. It comes across more like harsh judgment than a careful evaluation of a blend of strengths and weaknesses. We see ourselves through dirty windows, missing all the parts that are fresh and clean.

Broken Tiles

The author of the book Happiness is a Serious Problem wrote about what he called the Broken Tile Syndrome, where we walk into a kitchen where there’s a broken tile and despite all the tiles that are perfectly spaced and beautifully designed, our eyes gravitate to the one that’s broken. I think we tend to do that with our broken parts as well.

Our focus is drawn to what’s cracked and marred, to what doesn’t fit, the moral smudge on the sleeve, the character dirt on the face. We see the worst in ourselves and overlook all that’s good and beautiful and praiseworthy. We see ourselves through dirty windows and foggy mirrors as we stare too long at all our broken parts.

So as we obey the injunction to judge others softly, kindly, generously, patiently and humbly, we would do well to start applying those principles to ourselves as well. Imagine your beloved child sitting on your lap complaining about how terrible she is. What would you say to her? How would you convince your little one that she is a wonderful, beautiful gift, loved and worthy of that love with so much more going for her than her perceived flaws?

Say that to yourself. You are God’s child. As you would not harshly judge your own child, I believe He does not want us harshly judging His.

That’s not to say that you pretend character flaws are just peachy keen. It doesn’t mean you sugar coat your own words spoken deceitfully to yourself, winking disingenuously at your pretended wonderfulness.

But it does mean seeing the whole of yourself, not just the mud and grime between your moral toes. It means having grace as you see yourself clearly, recognizing we are all part of a fallen world, aiming at something more and leaning on Someone more.

Which You is You?

In a way, you are also your own child. The Right-Now-You is father to the Next-Year-You. The Today-You is mother to the Tomorrow-You. How you treat yourself now, the grace you extend, the kindness and patience you show, the forgiveness you hold in your heart will set the stage for how the Next-You will develop and evolve and grow … or shrink.

So give yourself some slack and do the best you can, even if your best produces lots of broken tiles. See yourself for the entirety of who you are, and let’s stop defining ourselves by our broken parts. And while we’re at it, let’s also stop comparing ourselves to the images of who others seem to be while dressed in their Sunday best, smiling and hugging and photographing the wonderful lives they post on social media.

We all go home and live out our lives behind doors that hide complicated lives in complicated relationships in a complicated world. So be good to others and be good to yourself.

I’m convinced that God would not want it any other way.

Photo courtesy of pixabay

“To uncover your true potential, you must first find your own limits, and then you have to have the courage to blow past them.” — Picabo Street, American alpine skier and 1998 Olympic gold medalist

Every four years, the world gathers to watch something extraordinary: athletes who have dedicated their entire lives to moments that last mere seconds. The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina is no exception. From the frost-covered mountains of Italy to the gleaming ice arenas, we’re witnessing stories that transcend sport—stories that remind us what it means to be human, to dream, to fail, and to triumph over the odds, over mental blocks, over fierce competition and adverse conditions and fatigue and falls and fears.

But these athletes are not just chasing gold medals. They’re teaching us something important, something important about our own lives. Their journeys remind us of our own struggles. Their victories remind us of our own potential, on a different scale for sure, but that we can also aim high and work hard and push through barriers, winning our gold. And their dogged resilience, their refusal to give up, their persistence in the daily grind shows us what’s possible when we also refuse to give up and let failure to define us.

The Winter Olympics, with its unique blend of preparation, grace in defeat, danger, grit and audacity, offers life lessons that reach beyond the slopes and rinks and points us down our own paths toward our own finish lines.

When Life Gets Messy, Stick to Your First Run

Norway’s Birk Ruud just proved something remarkable at these 2026 Games. On a gray, miserable day in Livigno where visibility was so poor that competitors were navigating “by feel,” Ruud nailed his first slopestyle run with a score of 86.28—a performance so clean it held up through everyone else’s attempts. While eight of the eleven skiers before him crashed, Ruud found his zone.

Even more telling: in his victory run, already guaranteed gold, Ruud went all-in trying an even harder combination. He crashed, bloodied his lip, and smiled through it all. “I was just trying to go beat myself up again,” he said afterward, gold medal gleaming despite the fresh wound.

Here’s the lesson: Sometimes conditions are terrible. The weather’s bad, you can’t see clearly, and everyone around you is falling. But if you trust your preparation and execute your plan with precision, you can succeed, sometimes against the competition, sometimes simply by finishing, other times by just showing up. For most of us, most of the time, we get to define victory. And so we get to decide how to celebrate our wins as well. 

Ruud’s approach to big air—which also won him gold in 2022—reveals his philosophy: “I’m free as a bird while I go, which is one of the best feelings in the world. I’m just very happy and thankful to be able to experience that.”

Life rarely offers perfect conditions. The key is showing up prepared, trusting yourself, and finding freedom in the doing and gratitude to be able to do it rather than obsessing over the outcome.

The Broken Medal That Symbolizes Everything

Twenty-year-old Alysa Liu’s gold medal literally broke. Just hours after helping Team USA clinch gold in the figure skating team event with a stunning performance to Laufey’s “Promise,” Liu jumped for joy with her medal—and it snapped right off the ribbon. The medal got scratched, dented, and had to be replaced.

“I actually liked it when it was off the ribbon, but that’s not allowed,” Liu said with characteristic humor. When asked if she could keep the broken one, she admitted, “I was like, can’t you just fix this one? I’m attached, but it’s OK. I’m detached, just like it was.”

Liu’s journey to that medal is even more remarkable. She retired from skating at just 16 after the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Two years of normal teenage life followed—school, photography, climbing to Mount Everest base camp.

Ok, maybe not exactly normal. Then, during a ski trip in January 2024, she felt the adrenaline rush she’d been missing. “I realized school was hard, but it was not challenging enough for me,” she explained to Cosmopolitan. “Skating gave me something to be strong for. I love having willpower.”

Within months, she returned to competition. By 2025, she was world champion. By 2026, she was standing on an Olympic podium. “What I’ve experienced the past two years has been nothing short of just incredible,” she reflected after winning gold.

The broken medal is perfect. It reminds us that achievements aren’t about pristine trophies we display forever—they’re about the moments of pure joy that crack us open. Sometimes the most meaningful successes come when we step away, rediscover what truly drives us, and return on our own terms.

When we seek challenge, we experience growth. When we grow, our lives are filled with expectation, improvement and the self acknowledgement that we’re better today than we were yesterday. We feel alive. We feel joy, that spark of confidence and meaning that we’re pursuing something that matters to us. Something that had purpose. We’re on a path. One of our own choosing. 

Success Isn’t Always About Beating Others

American freeskier Alex Hall came into the 2026 Olympics as the defending champion from Beijing. The slopestyle course in Livigno was brutal—“probably the hardest rail course I’ve ever skied,” he admitted. His chances of repeating were slim.

The night before finals, he went to bed thinking, “The odds of getting a medal are so slim… the run I was going to try and do, the chances of landing that [were small].”

But Hall had a revelation: “The four years in between, it didn’t ever feel like there was a day where I was like, ‘I’ve got to go train so I can get a medal’ or ‘I’ve got to go train so I can beat this person.’ I’m just gonna go ski, and I like skiing, so in a way it felt effortless because you’re just excited to go ski every day.”

He landed his impossibly difficult run. It earned him silver, just half a point behind Ruud. “Maybe, in a way, I’m almost more proud of it,” Hall said. “I’m really proud of myself for keeping up with how good everyone is nowadays.”

This echoes Bonnie Blair, the legendary speedskater who reminds us: “Winning doesn’t always mean being first. Winning means you’re doing better than you’ve ever done before.” Hall exemplified this perfectly—not fixated on defending his title, but on loving the process and executing at his highest level.

In our own lives, we often get trapped comparing ourselves to others, obsessing over rankings and outcomes, likes and follows. Hall shows us a better way: fall in love with the craft, show up with joy, and measure success by your own growth, not someone else’s scoreboard.

Honor What Brought You Here

When Birk Ruud stood on the podium listening to the Norwegian national anthem, his thoughts went to his father, who died of cancer in 2021.

“My dad is watching from somewhere else,” Ruud said. “When we played the national anthem, I was thinking of him and just everything that happens in life, and suddenly now I’m here, which is something I was working hard towards. Everybody here has been working towards it, and everybody is dreaming of the gold. When you think of all that, it’s a lot and I get emotional, which is beautiful. It’s a good feeling to have both happy and sad tears at the same time. It’s all beautiful.”

This capacity to hold joy and grief simultaneously, to honor those who shaped us even as we reach new heights, reflects deep maturity. Figure skating legend Kristi Yamaguchi captured this wisdom: “Focus, discipline, hard work, goal setting and, of course, the thrill of finally achieving your goals. These are all lessons of life.”

Our achievements are never ours alone. They’re built on the shoulders of parents, coaches, friends, rivals—everyone who pushed us, believed in us, or even doubted us. Remembering them in our moments of triumph isn’t weakness; it’s the very thing that makes those moments meaningful.

Comeback Stories Are Written in Years, Not Days

Picabo Street knows something about comebacks. After winning silver in downhill at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics—a surprise medal that announced her arrival to the world—she set her sights on gold. Then disaster struck: a terrible crash kept her off skis for a full year.

She started racing again just eight weeks before the 1998 Nagano Olympics. A week before the opening ceremony, she fell again and was knocked unconscious for two minutes. Medical staff and coaches questioned whether she should compete at all.

Then the super-G course was delayed a day due to heavy snow. When race day finally came, the course was almost as straight as a downhill. Street made the bold choice to use downhill skis instead of super-G skis. She won gold.

Reflecting years later, Street shared what many find surprising: “I have to admit that even though the gold was incredible, the stuff dreams are made of, the silver medal I received in Lillehammer occupies a special place in my heart, because it was my first Games. I wasn’t expected to get a medal; I was really just there to take part, to feel that nervous energy, to savor the experience. And then, much to my and everyone else’s surprise, I ended up on the podium. That’s why it was so special to me.”

The road back is never linear. It’s filled with setbacks that test whether we truly want what we say we want. But as Street reminds us, sometimes the journey itself—with all its unexpected turns and hard-won lessons—becomes more precious than the destination.

Find Your Fire and Keep It Lit

Mary Lou Retton, the gymnast who captured America’s heart at the 1984 Olympics, once said: “Each of us has a fire in our hearts for something. It’s our goal in life to find it and keep it lit.”

This is perhaps the most important lesson the Olympics teach us. These athletes have found their fire. Alysa Liu found hers on a ski slope when she thought she’d left it behind on the ice. Alex Hall found his in the pure joy of skiing, not in medals. Birk Ruud found his in pushing boundaries while honoring his late father’s memory. Picabo Street found hers in the challenge itself, in refusing to let injury define her story.

The fire isn’t always about being the best in the world. Sometimes it’s about being true to yourself, showing up when it’s hard, and choosing courage over comfort. It’s about the willingness to break your medal celebrating victory, to cry tears both happy and sad on the podium, to compete when you’re scared, and to get back up when you fall.

As Muhammad Ali, the 1960 Olympic gold medalist, boldly stated: “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”

While that may be an overstatement, the principle seems nonetheless true. You don’t pass the finish line without joining the race. You don’t build a successful company without starting it. And you don’t forge a wonderful marriage without first risking a date. 

Sometimes you Fall and Can’t Get Back Up!

Sometimes you simply crash and burn. And sometimes with some crashes and some burns, you don’t get back up again, at least not for a long recovery mile! Except the kind that takes your breathe away. We saw lots of that this year. In the men’s snowboard half pipe runs, all three medal winners fell on their third run. Ilia Malinin was expected to win the gold in the men’s ice skating competition.

No one was close to him. He may have been able to stand there and imagine his routine and he still would have won gold. They even called him the Quad God. And he crashed and burned. The look on his disbelieving face after the program finally and mercifully ended told the whole story.

And yet, when push came to shove, he leaped to his feet, and congratulated the person he crowned gold by virtue of his terrible performance. He was warm and gracious and kind and courageous and amazing.

But the finer point here is that we fall. All of us. And so what! We face plant. So what! We think we’re the next piece of toast, but prove otherwise. And so what? As soon as pride gets in the way of growth and decency, we lose. Big time. As long as we allow humility and graciousness to prevail, no matter how often or how hard we fall, we win every time.

Your Own Winter Games

You don’t need to strap on skis or lace up skates to apply these lessons. Every day offers its own Olympic moments—times when we must choose between playing it safe and going all-in, between giving up and getting back up, between measuring ourselves against others and measuring ourselves against our own potential.

The 2026 Winter Olympics reminds us that excellence isn’t about perfection. It’s about showing up in terrible conditions and executing anyway. It’s about returning to what you love after walking away. It’s about doing the impossibly difficult thing and being proud when you come up half a point short. It’s about carrying both joy and grief to the podium and knowing that both belong there.

As Picabo Street so powerfully reminds us, the real challenge isn’t in avoiding limits—it’s in having the courage to blow past them.

So find your fire. Keep it lit. Show up even when conditions are poor. Trust your first run. Celebrate so hard your medal breaks. Honor those who got you here. And when you inevitably fall—because you will fall—remember that getting back up is what makes you an Olympian in the truest sense of the word.

After all, life, like the Winter Olympics, isn’t really about the medals. Not ultimately. It’s about who you become in pursuit of your own dreams, passions and priorities.

Photo courtesy of pixabay

“Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to.” — Susan Cain

While happiness is a universal desire, it isn’t experienced the same way for all people. It would be a mistake to suppose that just because some are more subdued in their expression and experience with happiness that it therefore means that they are less happy or that their happiness is somehow inferior to more jubilant expressions.

Where one person experiences happiness as a knee-slapping good time, others experience it as a quiet satisfaction. Where some laugh and and dance as expressions of their joy, others settle into the relaxing rhythm of meaningful work that fills them with a sense of peace and contentment. One person’s thrill ride is another persons worst nightmare.

And that’s just a-okay. My favorite book doesn’t need to compare with your favorite mountain to climb. And your favorite ski resort doesn’t need to compare with my cup of hot chocolate and oversized hoodie on a cold day.

If my happiness seems bigger and louder than yours, yours is in no way diminished or undermined. You have permission to experience your joy the way you experience it without needing to explain or justify how you experience your happy place.

Introverted Happiness

Introverts need refreshing after periods of social interaction. They need to refuel on quiet and solitude. But to equate that with unhappiness is not only a mistake, it can be damaging because it’s highly misleading. Bad directions don’t hurt until they take you over a cliff.

Life can become unnecessarily hard when you keep ending up somewhere different than where you needed to be. And too many introverts are left in the middle of a map that doesn’t even have their properly identified destination on it.

So, what should be on that map? Where an extrovert may benefit from large gatherings and exciting adventure, an introvert may find more joy in more peaceful pursuits, in quiet time to think, a good book, a deep conversation and a warm fire by a comfy couch.

Introverts don’t usually suffer from a lack of personality. They suffer from a culture with a loud definition of happiness.

The popular happiness script is often written in extrovert ink: more parties, more networking, more “put yourself out there,” more stimulation, more excitement and gatherings and partying. Find an adventure. Take a Carnival Cruise. Be the life of the party. The explanation mark at the end of the happiness sentence for an extrovert is fun and laughter. In short, more visible expressions of happiness.

If you’re energized by that, wonderful. But if you’re not, you can end up living with the subtle suspicion that something is wrong with you—that your happiest life is always one social upgrade away.

That suspicion is the problem.

Happiness for introverts isn’t happiness minus people. It’s happiness with the right dosage of the right people, the right kind of connection, the right pace, and enough quiet to let life sink in. And time to recover when you can’t escape the noisier moments of life.

And if you get that wrong—if you live like someone else and believe you’re supposed to live that way—you can accidentally build a life that looks impressive but feels exhausting and overwhelming and maybe a bit empty or depressing. But it might just be that you’re aiming at the wrong kind of happiness.

Introversion Isn’t Sadness

Introversion is less about being shy and more about how you respond to stimulation, especially social stimulation. Many introverts love people. They just pay a higher energetic “cover charge” to be around them—especially in groups, especially for long stretches, especially when small talk and noise crowd out the deeper, more intimate moments introverts crave and live for.

So the happiness equation for an introvert often comes down to stimulation management.

Think of your nervous system like a phone battery. Some people can livestream all day and still be at 72%. For others, it only takes walking through a mall with too many people talking too loudly to start seeing the red warning bar. That’s not weakness. It’s wiring. And wiring isn’t a moral failure.

The trouble begins when introverts interpret that wiring as a character flaw and try to “fix” it by force-feeding themselves a lifestyle they can’t metabolize. Or when extroverts try to force introverted pegs into the shape of extroverted holes.

That’s the problem I encountered when I tried to push the square peg of my introverted son into the round hole of my extroverted expression of fun and happiness. Try this! Do that! Experience life this way! That works for someone who is constitutionally built like me. But not for anyone else.

An Important Distinction

Some introverts are also Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)—people who are high in sensory-processing sensitivity, a trait researched and described by psychologist Elaine Aron. But not all introverts are HSPs, and not all HSPs are introverts.

Confusing the two can make you misread your needs. If you’re sensitive, it may not just be people that drain you; it may be bright lights, constant notifications, conflict, noise, or compressed schedules.

Happiness becomes easier when you name the correct problem because only then can you find the correct solution.

Extroversion is Associated with Happiness—but that’s not the whole story

Having said what I’ve so far said notwithstanding, studies do show a positive link between extraversion and measures of subjective well-being. Classic work in personality psychology has treated this as close to conventional wisdom, and meta-analytic research finds personality traits (including extraversion) correlate meaningfully with well-being.

So yes, on average, more extraverted people often report higher positive affect.

But averages hide individuals.

Introverts read those findings and sometimes walk away with a depressing conclusion: If extraverts are happier, then I’m totally doomed to a sad and miserable life.

That conclusion is not supported by the most important part of the research: the “why” underneath the averages—namely, social relationship quality and emotion regulation.

A large study examining happiness across introverts and extraverts found extraverts reported higher happiness overall, but it also showed something more hopeful and more useful: among introverts, high-quality social relationships were linked to higher happiness particularly when emotion regulation ability was also higher.

Translation: introverts don’t need to become extroverts to be happy. They need two things that are completely learnable:

1. the right relationships, and
2. the right emotional skills to handle life’s internal weather.

Happiness isn’t a popularity contest. It’s a stability-and-meaning contest.

So let me be clear if what’s been said isn’t yet clear enough: The reason extroverts report higher levels of happiness may not be because they are extroverted, but because extroverts have an easier time of making friends and regulating their emotions. And no wonder in a world that shouts at introverts for not being extroverted!

Introverts who work on those skills report comparable levels of well-being. Let me repeat that. Never mind. Just reread it!

The Introvert’s Trap

A large percentage of introvert unhappiness is not caused by being introverted. It’s caused by a predictable overcorrection: If stimulation drains me, then emotional safety must mean less people, less interaction, less life.

So many introverts avoid.

They avoid invitations, conflict, difficult conversations, vulnerable relationships, new groups, leadership roles, unfamiliar spaces. And they call it “protecting our peace.”

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it’s just fear dressed nicely.

Sometimes its an excuse to stay firmly in the comfort of long-held comfort zones. If that’s the case, introverts can fall victim to their own misinterpretations of happiness.

The Introvert Advantage

And here’s where introverts have an advantage, if they use it well. Introverts are often good at reflection. They do it a lot. Reflection can produce wisdom … or rumination. Solitude can restore … or spiral. It’s not a guarantee, but there’s a choice and therefore a path toward more peace and joy in your introverted life.

Recent research on solitude emphasizes exactly this kind of nuance: time alone isn’t automatically good or bad. It depends on factors like why you’re alone, what you do while alone, and whether your alone time becomes a place of restoration or negative thinking, reenergizing or isolated loneliness.

So the goal isn’t more solitude. Or less. The goal is better solitude—and enough connection to keep your mind from becoming an echo chamber of emptiness.

A Surprising Finding

Here’s the part many introverts resist: multiple studies suggest that momentary extraverted behavior (more talkative, assertive, energetic) is associated with higher positive affect for many people, including introverts.

In fact, one line of research suggests introverts may underpredict how good it will feel to act more extraverted in the moment—which comes down to an affective forecasting error.

This does not mean introverts should pretend to be extroverts all day. It means something subtler and far more empowering:

• You can “turn up” socially on purpose when it serves what matters.
• You can choose moments of outward engagement like you’d choose a workout: intentional, bounded, followed by recovery.

This fits beautifully with what the personality psychologist and professor, Brian Little, discovered about the idea of “free traits”—the notion that people can act out of character in the service of core personal projects (work you value, people you love, causes you care about), with positive outcome.

Introvert happiness isn’t found by hiding from life. It’s found by engaging life on terms your nervous system can sustain. And most introverts can sustain limited spurts of extroverted behavior.

This finding does not undermine what’s been said. It simply identifies two truths:

1. Aspects of extroversion do seem to benefit happiness.
2. People do not have to be extroverts to act extroverted and thereby pick up those benefits any more than only vegetarians benefit from eating their veggies.

What Introverts Actually Need For Happiness

If you strip away the cultural noise and the personality stereotypes, introvert happiness tends to rest on a few pillars (some of which we’ve already touched on):

1. Depth over breadth in relationships

Introverts often flourish with fewer relationships that are more meaningful—friends where conversation goes somewhere, beyond small talk and chit chat. Introverts thrive on depth and meaning, on purposeful conversation about things that matter.

This is not elitism. It’s nutrition for the introvert’s soul. Small talk is cotton candy; depth is nutritional substance. Introverts thrive on substance.

Practice: instead of aiming at “more friends,” aim at “more meaningful contact.” Happiness for introverts does not come in large numbers. It comes in small, but deeply meaningful packages. To grow your introverted joy, try whatever floats your happiness boat. Try…

• One long walk with someone you trust.
• One weekly call with someone safe.
• One monthly dinner where you can actually hear each other speak about things that matter to the two of you.
• Avoid the large office parties and find a small group of people who share your interests.

The points isn’t to never push against your introverted comfort zone. Their is no growth or happiness in personal stagnation for any personality type. Rather, it’s to push the right amount in the right way, in the right place to get the best results.

2. Solitude that restores rather than isolates

Many introverts can overly isolate if they’re not careful. Solitude is not the enemy, but solitude without intention can turn into iron bars. Not all introverts have social anxiety, but almost all those with social anxiety are introverts. According to one study, about 46% of the population are introverts, but almost 94% of those with social anxiety are, in fact, introverts.

Avoid being alone simply to be alone. Introverts can get lonely too, after all. Loneliness is not healthy and emotional unhealth is not the recipe for happiness. Instead of simply being by yourself, be alone with a purpose.

The point is to be productively alone. Be alone because of something, not instead of something. Don’t stay home because you don’t feel like going to the party, stay home to get something done, to practice something or complete something or try something or improve on something or to spend time with someone.

Practice the following: give solitude a job description.

• Process—the current day, the previous day’s activities, a conversation you recently had, an event you attended, a comfort zone you gently, but firmly, pressed
• Create—art, music, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, a business plan, a vision statement, a bird house
• Pray/meditate—engage in the grounding and centering powers of your faith. Study scripture. Pray out loud. Connect to the divine, to the sacred, to the eternal
• Read/learn—find a good book, a podcast, a blog or article, a workbook, guide or instructive YouTube channel.
• Walk—in the woods, a park, or neighborhood. Find a nature trail or a botanical garden near you
• Journal—write out your thoughts, ideas, feelings, goals, dreams, plans. Organize your thinking. Prioritize your dreams and next steps.
• Plan—for your future, for your day, for a happy life, a meaningful experience, a vacation or business, the new year.

Aimless solitude is where rumination grows. Socially anxious introverts can create a self-fulfilling loop of isolation and unhappiness. Break that cycle.

Plan purposeful solitude if solitude is needed. But don’t isolate as escapism, retreating to the easy enclave of separation. Recharge when you have to. When you don’t, challenge yourself. Step outside of your comfort zone—not by miles, and maybe only by feet or inches. But step.

3. Emotional regulation as a happiness superpower

Emotional regulation looks different for introverts—and that’s not a weakness, it’s a design feature.

While extroverts often regulate emotions through external processing and social connection, introverts need a different approach that honors how their nervous systems actually work.

Energy First, Everything Else Second

For introverts, emotional regulation starts with energy management. Solitude isn’t selfishness; it’s essential maintenance. When you’re overstimulated or socially depleted, even minor frustrations can feel overwhelming. Building in regular quiet time—even just 15 minutes between commitments—prevents emotional overwhelm before it starts.

Give Yourself Permission to Process Internally

Introverts need time to sort through feelings before they’re ready to discuss them. Forcing yourself to “talk it out” immediately can actually increase dysregulation. Journaling, walking alone, or simply sitting with your thoughts often works better than immediate conversation. Your internal world is where the real work happens and sets the stage for where the rest of life is experienced.

Boundaries Are Preventive Medicine

Rather than managing emotional fallout after you’re already overwhelmed, set boundaries proactively. Limit social commitments, have exit strategies at events, and schedule buffer time between activities. This isn’t antisocial—it’s strategic self-care that prevents the need for dramatic recovery later.

Use Deep Focus as Your Secret Weapon

Many introverts regulate emotions beautifully through absorbed solo activities: reading, creating, coding, gardening, meditating, praying. This isn’t avoidance. It’s leveraging your natural strength for deep concentration to process emotions indirectly while your conscious mind is productively engaged.

Choose Quality Over Quantity

One meaningful conversation with a trusted person often regulates emotions more effectively than seeking support from multiple people or in group settings, which can drain more than help.

The Real Secret

What works for extroverts—immediate processing, seeking crowds, staying busy—might actually disregulate you. The secret to emotional regulation as an introvert is simple: stop treating your need for internal processing and solitude as something to overcome. It’s not withdrawal. It’s not antisocial. It’s not a cause of concern or evidence of brokenness. It’s how you metabolize experience, restore balance, and show up as your best self.

If better emotion regulation helps explain why some introverts report higher happiness, that’s not merely interesting—it’s a roadmap.

Emotional regulation isn’t a recipe for cutting off or shutting down or refusing to admit your feelings and emotions. It’s naming what you feel accurately. It’s soothing your nervous system. It’s choosing responses you respect and refusing to let a moment become the permanent stage of your life.

Emotional regulation is to happiness what a referee is to a soccer game. Play the game, but play it within a context that makes sense, is fair and can be understood and played with order and a degree of predictability. Chaos is no fun for introverts especially. An emotionally unregulated person is chaos personified and happiness unexperienced.

In short, introverts often have rich inner worlds. That richness can become a garden … or a jungle. Regulation is the difference.

4. Intentional “extroverted sprints”

This is the missing bridge: introverts do need connection, visibility, contribution, and community. They just need it in forms that don’t overwhelm them.

Think of social energy like sunlight. The goal isn’t to live in darkness. The goal is to not get sunburned.

Practice the following: schedule extroverted moments with boundaries like these…

• “I’ll go for 60 minutes.”
• “I’ll arrive early, leave early.”
• “I’ll have one deep conversation, not twenty shallow ones.”
• “I’ll plan a recovery hour afterward.”

The Introvert Happiness Plan

Introverts want to be as happy as extroverts want to be happy. They just want it on their own terms. So do extroverts, for that matter. This is not a personality makeover. It’s a lifestyle alignment. Try the following scheduled map to greater and more predictable joy:

Daily habits

1. A quiet anchor
   Prayer, meditation, journaling, scripture, slow reading—anything that returns you to yourself.
2. A “nervous system reset”
   Two slow breaths before a meeting. A short walk after. A stretch with no phone. You’re teaching your body that it isn’t being hunted.
3. One meaningful contact (text, voice note, short call)
   Not constant socializing—just a small thread of connection.

Weekly habits

1. One deep connection
   Walk-and-talk, dinner with one couple, a long conversation with your spouse, time with a trusted friend.
2. One contribution
   Volunteer, teach, lead a small group, write something inspiring, motivational, instructional, helpful—something that benefits others. Not because introverts need to be fixed, but because happiness grows when life becomes meaningful and doing something positive for others adds meaning, purpose and joy to all of our lives.
3. A solitude sabbath
   Enjoy a guilt-free protected block of time, a few hours if a day is unavailable, where you read, write, hike, reflect. This is recharging by connecting to something higher or grander or deeper, something grounding, something spiritual and soul-satisfying and soothing.

Monthly habits

1. A “social calibration” review
   Ask:
   • Which social activities gave me life?
   • Which drained me without meaning?
   • What do I need less of?
   • What do I need more of?
2. A stretch event (optional but powerful)
   A gathering, a class, a community meeting—done intentionally, with a recovery plan. This is how introverts keep their world from shrinking.

The Deeper Shift: stop chasing “cultural happiness” and start building “your happiness”

There’s a reason happiness advice often fails introverts: it’s too generic. It’s like prescribing the same diet to a marathon runner and a powerlifter.

Introverts don’t need more noise. They need more fit—a life that fits their temperament, values, and energy.

So the question isn’t, “How can I be happier?”

The better question is:

“What kind of life would my nervous system and my soul both recognize as home, as safe, as peaceful, and as energizing?”

For many introverts, that looks something like the following:

• Fewer but truer relationships,
• Purposeful solitude,
• Emotional steadiness,
• Meaningful contribution,
• And social courage in small, sustainable doses.

This brings us back to Susan Cain’s line—simple, almost obvious, but strangely radical in a culture that pressures everyone toward the same kind of “fun”:

“Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to.”

That’s not permission to hide. It’s permission to live truthfully.

And a truthful life—one aligned with who you are and what you value—does something that forced extroversion never can:

It makes happiness less of a chase and more of a byproduct.

Photo courtesy of pixabay

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” — C.S. Lewis

The Tyranny of Continuity

We are prisoners of our own continuity. Change, it turns out, is most often quite difficult. Yesterday’s version of ourselves stubbornly reaches into today, grabbing us by the collar, insisting that we remain consistently consistent. We wake up and immediately resume the story we’ve been telling, pick up the patterns we’ve been repeating, and slip back into the identity we’ve been performing.

But here’s what we forgot in our sleepy stumble out of bed: every single morning is resurrection day. And we get to choose what will be resurrected.

The sun doesn’t rise reluctantly, apologizing for yesterday’s weather. Birds don’t wake up and think, “Well, I sang poorly yesterday, so I might as well keep quiet today.” Nature understands something we’ve forgotten—that each day is genuinely, radically new. Not metaphorically. Actually.

The question isn’t whether we can begin again. The question is whether we’ll give ourselves permission to do so.

The Science of Fresh Starts

Behavioral economists have a term for what happens when we encounter temporal landmarks—moments that feel like new beginnings. They call it the “fresh start effect,” and it’s a powerful motivational force in human psychology.

Researchers Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis discovered that people are significantly more likely to pursue goals and make positive changes after temporal landmarks like New Year’s Day, birthdays, the first day of a month, or even Mondays. These markers create psychological distance from our past selves, making it easier to overcome perceived failures and commit to change. They are, in effect, new beginnings.

But here’s what makes this research revolutionary: the effect isn’t just about major landmarks. Any moment can become a fresh start if we frame it as one.

The beginning of a new day. A conversation that shifts perspective. A decision to see this moment differently than the last. The minute hand at the top of the clock. We don’t have to wait for January 1st or our next birthday to begin again. We can declare a fresh start right now, in this breath, on this ordinary Wednesday afternoon.

The power isn’t in the calendar. It’s in our capacity to reframe time itself.

Why We Resist Beginning Again

If new beginnings are so accessible, why don’t we use them more freely? The resistance is deep and multifaceted. Here’s a sample of what I mean…

The sunk cost fallacy. We’ve invested so much time, energy, and identity into our current path that abandoning it—even when it’s not working—feels like admitting defeat. We confuse perseverance with stubbornness, grit with inflexibility.

The consistency bias. We believe we’re on the right path merely because we’re on that path. And the longer we spend on it, the more we subconsciously feel the need to defend it. We need to be the same person we were yesterday, last year, a decade ago. Changing our minds, shifting direction, or becoming someone different feels like betrayal—of others, of our past selves, of some half-imagined contract we signed when we first chose this path.

Fear of judgment. What will people think if we start over? If we admit we were wrong? If we choose differently this time? We carry the invisible weight of others’ expectations, real or imagined, and it keeps us locked in place. It’s like our past identity, who we were (professionally, attitudinally, spiritually), ties us to that expectation.

I’m a teacher, not a blogger. I’m a cop, not a YouTube content creator. I’m an employee, not an entrepreneur, a songwriter, or an author. One prevents the other because we’re embarrassed to be something we’ve never been. What will others think? And so we stay stuck in the middle of what we’ve so far been.

The exhaustion of change. Starting over is hard. It requires energy we’re not sure we have. It demands hope when we’re running on empty. Sometimes continuing on the familiar path, even if it’s leading nowhere good, feels easier than summoning the courage to turn around.

But staying stuck isn’t actually easier. It’s just slower suffering.

The Neuroscience of Neuroplasticity

Your brain is not fixed. This might be the most important sentence you read today.

For decades, neuroscientists believed that after a certain age, the brain became static—that neural pathways were set, personality was fixed, and fundamental change was impossible. This belief shaped everything from education to therapy to our personal narratives about who we could become.

Then came the neuroplasticity revolution.

We now know that the brain remains remarkably plastic throughout life. New neural connections form constantly. Old pathways can be weakened and new ones strengthened through repeated practice and intentional attention. The physical structure of your brain is literally reshaping itself in response to your experiences, thoughts, and behaviors.

What this means practically is that you are not doomed to repeat yesterday. Your habits, patterns, and automatic responses aren’t permanent features—they’re current configurations that can be reconfigured.

Every time you choose differently, you’re not just behaving differently. You’re rewiring your brain. You’re creating new neural pathways that make the new choice easier next time. You’re literally becoming a different person at the neurological level.

Beginning again isn’t just poetic or psychological. It’s biological.

The Architecture of Reinvention

Throughout history, some of the most impactful lives have been defined not by consistency but by radical reinvention. They understood that identity isn’t a fixed structure but an ongoing construction project.

Consider Julia Child, who didn’t discover her passion for cooking until she was 37 and didn’t publish her first cookbook until she was 50. Or Vera Wang, who entered the fashion industry at 40 after careers in figure skating and journalism. Or Colonel Sanders, who franchised Kentucky Fried Chicken at 62 after a lifetime of failed ventures.

These aren’t exceptions. They’re examples of what becomes possible when we release the myth that our path must be linear, that we must remain consistent with who we were, that beginning again somehow invalidates everything that came before.

Your life doesn’t have to be a straight line. It can be a spiral, a web, a constellation of beginnings that illuminate different aspects of who you are and who you’re becoming.

The Daily Practice of Beginning

Still, the most profound kind of beginning again isn’t dramatic reinvention. It’s the quiet, daily practice of not being held hostage by yesterday.

Think about how you typically start your day. For most of us, the morning routine is on autopilot. We wake up, check our phones, and immediately download yesterday’s concerns into today’s consciousness.

We rehearse old grievances, worry about persistent problems, and slip seamlessly back into the narrative we’ve been living. Old habits remain current habits. Former ways of doing things stay the way we do them still.

But what if morning could be genuinely new?

This doesn’t mean spiritual bypassing or pretending problems don’t exist. It means choosing not to begin each day by immediately reactivating every stress, conflict, and concern from yesterday. It means creating a brief space between sleep and story where you can ask: Who do I want to be today? What do I want to create? What possibility exists in these next 24 hours?

The Buddhists have a concept called “beginner’s mind”, which includes approaching each moment with openness and curiosity, free from the burden of expertise and assumption. This isn’t about forgetting what you know. It’s about not letting what you know prevent you from seeing what’s new.

Every day offers this opportunity. Every morning is a chance to meet yourself and your life with fresh eyes. It’s an opportunity to choose a new path, a novel approach, a kinder disposition, a grateful mindset, a curious response. You become the author of this chapter, this page, the next few sentences you write in the book of your own life.

The Relationship Reset

One of the most powerful applications of beginning again is in relationships. We often lock people—including ourselves—into fixed narratives based on past behavior.

“He’s always late.” “She never listens.” “I’m terrible at communication.” “I’m shy.” “He’s selfish.” “She’s boring.” These stories become self-fulfilling prophecies. We see what we expect to see, respond based on past patterns, and perpetuate the very dynamics we claim we want to change.

But relationships are not static. They’re living systems that respond to input. When one person genuinely begins again, choosing to see the other person in a new and fresh way, through the eyes of curiosity or compassion or forgiveness or understanding, we can respond differently, and release old resentments and bring new energy. The entire dynamic can thereby shift. 

A new mindset produces a new interaction which produces a new lived reality. At least in time, as others learn to trust and accept the new you. 

This doesn’t mean ignoring real problems or accepting unacceptable behavior. It means recognizing that people can change, that yesterday’s interaction doesn’t have to determine today’s, and that holding someone to who they used to be prevents both of you from discovering who they might become.

The same applies to how you relate to yourself. The person you were yesterday made certain choices. The person you are today doesn’t have to make the same ones. You can forgive yourself, learn what there is to learn, and choose differently. Not someday. Today. Now.

The Failure Paradox

Here’s something our culture gets backwards: failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s the prerequisite.

Every significant achievement is built on a foundation of failed attempts, wrong turns, and experiments that didn’t work. But we’ve created a cultural narrative that treats failure as permanent, a fixed condition, as evidence of inadequacy, as a reason to stop trying.

This narrative is killing us. It keeps people stuck in jobs they hate, relationships that don’t work, and lives that feel increasingly distant from who they actually are. This is because starting over, trying again, admitting the current approach isn’t working requires that we acknowledge some form of failure. And too many of us would rather suffer in familiar failure than risk visible struggle in pursuit of something better.

But failure is just information. It tells you what doesn’t work so you can try something that might. It’s feedback, not verdict. It points and directs, teaches and reminds us that one way is less effective than other ways and nudges us to try again. 

The most successful people aren’t those who never fail. They’re those who’ve learned to begin again quickly, to extract the lesson without internalizing the shame, to see each attempt not as a referendum on their worth but as an experiment in what’s possible.

You don’t have one shot. You have as many shots as you’re willing to take.

The Permission You’re Waiting For

Many of us are waiting for permission to begin again. Permission from parents, partners, employers, society, or some internalized authority we can’t quite name. Some wait for a sign, for a good omen, for the universe to speak.

We’re waiting for someone to tell us it’s okay to change our minds, to want something different, to become someone new. We’re waiting for conditions to be perfect, for the timing to be right, for all the pieces to align.

But permission doesn’t arrive from outside. It’s something you grant yourself.

You don’t need anyone’s approval to begin again. You don’t need perfect circumstances or a clear path forward. You don’t need to have it all figured out before you take the first step.

You just need to decide that today can be different than yesterday. That this moment doesn’t have to be a continuation of the last. That you have agency, choice, and the right to redirect your own life.

The permission you’re waiting for? It’s already granted. By virtue of being alive, breathing, conscious, and capable of choice, you have permission to begin again. Always. That is not only a God-given right, but a God-given responsibility. The choice is yours and your life waits for you to choose it.

The Art of Micro-Beginnings

Not all new beginnings require dramatic life overhauls. In fact, the most sustainable transformations often start impossibly small.

James Clear’s research on atomic habits demonstrates that tiny changes, consistently applied, compound into remarkable transformations over time. A 1% improvement each day leads to being 37 times better over a year. The math is simple, but the implications are profoundly powerful.

You don’t need to revolutionize your entire life tomorrow. You can begin today with one small step, a micro-improvement, a tiny habit.

Change how you speak to yourself in the mirror this morning. Start the day with prayer. Text the friend you’ve been meaning to reach out to. Write one step of the project you’ve been avoiding. Do one pushup. Drink a glass of water before breakfast. Sit in silence for two minutes. Open scripture. Read the first paragraph of the book you’ve been meaning to read.

These aren’t trivial acts. They’re declarations. Each new choice, no matter how small, is a vote for a new version of yourself. Each micro-beginning creates momentum, proves that change is possible, and makes the next step in that new trajectory easier.

You don’t begin again once, dramatically and completely. You begin again in a thousand small moments, each one a quiet revolution.

The Courage to Be Inconsistent

One of the greatest barriers to beginning again is the fear of being inconsistent—of looking foolish, flaky, or unreliable because we’ve changed our minds or direction.

But consistency is overrated. Or rather, we’ve confused consistency of behavior with consistency of values.

Being true to your deepest values might require being wildly inconsistent in your current choices, career, and life path. The person you were five years ago had different information, different experiences, and different understanding. The whole context of your life could now be wildly different than it had been when choices were made and decisions cemented in the concrete of your personal history. Why should you be bound by those decisions? 

Growth requires inconsistency. Learning requires changing your mind. Wisdom often means doing the opposite of what you did before because you now know better.

The people worth keeping in your life will respect your evolution. The ones who demand you remain static to make them comfortable? They’re asking you to betray yourself for their convenience.

Your life is not a brand that requires consistent messaging. It’s an unfolding story that changes as you change. Be inconsistent. Be contradictory. Be someone who learns and adjusts and grows. Don’t vary from truth or principle, from what’s right and wrong. But don’t get stuck in a rigid insistence that you are right and they are wrong.

Change is not necessarily weakness. And it very well may be the start of a deeper wisdom.

The Energy of Anticipation

There’s a unique energy that comes with new beginnings—a sense of possibility, potential, and hope. Scientists have studied this phenomenon and found that anticipation of positive experiences actually creates more happiness than the experience itself.

This is why New Year’s Eve often feels more energizing than New Year’s Day and why planning a vacation can be more exciting than the actual vacation ends up being.

The beginning contains all possibility and no disappointment. It’s pure potential.

You can access this energy without waiting for major life events or calendar milestones. You can create it by intentionally framing each day as a beginning, each project as an experiment, each conversation as a chance for something new to emerge.

What if you approached today with the energy you bring to the first day of a new job? The anticipation of a first date? The possibility of a fresh start?

The circumstances might be ordinary, but the energy you bring transforms everything. Beginners are energized because they believe things can be different. They haven’t yet been worn down by repetition and familiarity. They haven’t yet fallen into the ruts of way things have always been done here.

Begin again and you reclaim that energy. Every single day.

The Myth of the Perfect Moment

One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that we need to wait for the right moment to begin again. We need more money, more time, more clarity, more confidence, more support.

We’re waiting for some future version of ourselves who’s more capable, more ready, more deserving of the life we want.

But that future self doesn’t exist. There’s only you, now, with whatever you currently have and whoever you currently are.

The perfect moment is a mirage that recedes as you approach. There will always be a reason to wait, an excuse to delay, a justification for staying stuck. Life doesn’t hand you permission or perfect conditions. It hands you moments—ordinary, imperfect, messy moments—and asks what you’ll do with them.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. The same is true for almost everything meaningful in life.

You won’t feel ready. You won’t have it all figured out. You’ll begin anyway, and readiness will emerge through the act of continuing.

The Compound Effect of Daily Renewal

Imagine if you genuinely began again each day for a year. Not changing everything, but showing up fresh, releasing yesterday’s mistakes and disappointments, and choosing with intention rather than autopilot.

365 new beginnings.

What would be different? Who would you become?

The compound effect isn’t just about habits. It’s about identity. Each day you begin again, you strengthen the neural pathways of agency, possibility, and self-authorship. You become someone who doesn’t stay stuck. Someone who learns and adjusts. Someone who knows that yesterday’s version of you doesn’t control today.

This is how transformation actually happens—not through dramatic revelations or sudden complete reinventions, but through the accumulation of daily choices to see freshly and act differently.

The person you’ll be a year from now is being created in how you begin today.

Practical Framework: The Daily Reset

If you want to harness the power of beginning again, here’s a practical framework:

Morning Ritual

Before checking your phone or engaging with the world, take three minutes to do this:

Breath Reset: Take five slow, deep breaths. With each exhale, imagine releasing yesterday.

Set the Day’s Intention: Ask yourself: “Who do I want to be today?” Not what you want to accomplish, but who you want to be.

Possibility Scan: Consider one thing that could be different today if you brought fresh eyes to it. Look through the lens of possibility instead of doubt and cynicism.

Throughout the Day

Micro-Resets: When you notice yourself operating on autopilot or stuck in a negative pattern, pause. Take three breaths. Choose again.

Pattern Interrupt: If you catch yourself about to repeat an unhelpful behavior or response, stop. Ask: “Is this who I want to be right now?” Then choose.

Evening Reflection

Before sleep, spend two minutes on this:

Acknowledge Growth: Notice one way you chose differently today, however small.

Release the Day: Literally tell yourself “I release this day.” Don’t carry it into tomorrow.

Set Tomorrow Free: Remind yourself that tomorrow is genuinely new, unwritten, and full of possibility.

The Sacred Ordinariness of Another Chance

Here’s what makes daily renewal so profound: it democratizes transformation. You don’t need a crisis, a dramatic life event, or a perfect moment. You just need another morning, another breath, another chance.

This is available to everyone, always. The billionaire and the person struggling to pay rent both get the same 24 hours. The same opportunity to begin again. The same access to choice.

You may not each have the same range of choices that can be made. You may not be able to choose to eat lunch in Paris and dinner in Cabo. But you can choose your mindset and attitude, your words and gratitude, your goals and the steps you’ll take today toward the person you hope to be.

Your circumstances might not change overnight. But your relationship to those circumstances can shift immediately. Your story about who you are and what’s possible can be rewritten with today’s choices.

The sun rises without asking permission, without needing perfect conditions, without waiting until everything is ready. It just rises. And in rising, it creates the conditions for everything else to begin.

You can do the same.

The Invitation

Right now, in this moment, you have a choice. You can continue the pattern you’ve been in—the thoughts, the behaviors, the story about who you are and what’s possible. Or you can begin again.

Not tomorrow. Not Monday. Not next month or next year. But now.

You can release the version of yourself you’ve been performing and try on something new. You can forgive yourself for yesterday’s choices and choose differently today. You can look at the relationships, work, and life you’ve been living and ask: “What if I approached this freshly?”

This isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending problems don’t exist. It’s about refusing to let yesterday’s struggles determine today’s possibilities. It’s about recognizing that you are not bound by who you’ve been, that change is always available, and that each moment offers the opportunity to turn toward something better.

The gift of a new day isn’t just that time has passed. It’s that you get another chance. To try. To choose. To become.

You’ve already survived everything that’s happened until now. You’re still here, still breathing, still capable of beginning again.

So begin.

Not perfectly. Not with complete clarity or ironclad confidence. Just begin.

The morning doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. It arrives, indifferent and generous, offering its possibility to everyone who opens their eyes.

Today is already here. What will you do with it?

Photo compliments of pixabay

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

— Aristotle

Goals often have the curious ability of making intelligent people feel stupid. Or at least a little bit silly.

It goes something like this:

You set a goal that you feel really excited about. You set it sincerely, confidently, thinking, “This is the year it’s finally going to stick! This is the year things are going to really take off!”

You feel a spark of excitement, of motivation, of possibility and hope—the clean page, the fresh start, the imagined future-self who finally “gets it together.” You buy the shoes. Download the app. Make the plan. Tell a friend. Maybe even post it, hoping public visibility will reinforce personal follow-through.

The Slow Fade

And the thing is you start impressively strong. You’re at the gym, on the court, opening the app, stuffing a rainbow of colored veggies in the fridge. You flushed the cigarettes or already started saying thank you more.

Then a week goes by and then another. Excuses begin to slow progress. Each excuse follows the next almost as fast as the days add up.

Slowly and quietly, you return to your default settings. You fade from jogging to walking, from daily to periodically, from aiming to drifting, from growing to stagnating.

No abrupt stops or about-faces, just slowly slowing down. A stride at a time. A cookie here and a tub of ice cream there. Until you realize you’re standing still again.

Goals are forgotten and resolutions are no longer resolved as we naturally fall back in line with the daily flow of living as we settle uncomfortably into the way things have always been. Running shoes gather dust and books become paper weights and novels remain unwritten and temper left untempered.

But it’s not because you don’t care. It’s not because you’re lazy or lack willpower or have some incurable moral failing. Well, I mean you might, but not necessarily.

To Habit or Not to Habit. That is the Question!

Most of us keep falling short of our goals because we treat them like destinations when they’re actually directions. Goals are targets you aim at. They are the distant Became, not the current Becoming. And that leaves you in the position of ignoring the very vehicle that can actually get you across the finish line. That’s the art and practice of habits.

A goal is the outcome you want. A habit is the mechanism that produces the outcome. To the degree you confuse the two, your life becomes a graveyard of noble but unrealized intentions.

The habit solution is the most practical way I know to stop “trying harder” and start building the daily machinery that makes accomplishment predictable. It’s not merely identifying action steps. It’s habituating them. It doesn’t matter how hard you pump the gas pedal if there’s no gas in the tank. Habits fill your tank.

The Statistics behind “I’ll Start Next Week”

The annual ritual of setting New Year’s resolutions is basically a nationwide optimism festival followed by a quiet surrender, when, as a friend once shared, “January smoothies soon become April milk shakes.”

A longitudinal study tracking New Year’s resolution-makers found that 77% maintained their pledges for only one week, while 19% were still maintaining them two years later.

On the other hand, more recently, a large-scale experiment on New Year’s resolutions (with over a thousand participants) reported that at a one-year follow-up, 55% of respondents considered themselves successful in sustaining their resolutions. Importantly to your likelihood of success, people with approach-oriented goals (“exercise more”) were significantly more successful than those with avoidance-oriented goals (“stop eating junk food”)—58.9% vs. 47.1%.

It seems that we’re more motivated chasing something we want than running away from something we don’t. Other research shows that improving a talent you already have is a better use of time than trying to overcome a weakness you no longer want to have.

Even the intention to set resolutions isn’t as universal as you might think. A YouGov poll for 2026 found that only 31% of Americans say they will make New Year’s resolutions or set a goal. For those who do set January goals, the most common resolutions include exercising more, eating healthier, saving money, and “being happy.”

Hmmm. I know a guy who writes a bit about that last one!

Here’s the point:

The problem isn’t goals. While there are better and less effective ways of setting them, that’s not the issue either. And it’s not that some goal-setters are undisciplined losers. They may or may not have set the right goals in the right way or at the right time in their lives. But that’s not even the primary issue.

The problem is that goals are over-trusted. We put the weight of transformation on a sentence we wrote on January 1.

But if we don’t set up a process, a structure, something to maintain focus and create reliable momentum, keeping us coming back and tweaking and fine-tuning, we’re ultimately doomed to failure.

And when we fail yet again—another resolution left unresolved, another promise to ourselves unkept, one more personal development face-plant—we not only lose trust in the efficacy of goal setting but in ourselves as well.

That’s when we give up. That’s why so few people set goals and resolutions each year. They have an expectation of failure because they have a history of that all-too-familiar outcome. And who doesn’t want to avoid failure?

If you don’t aim, you can’t miss.

And so we give up aiming at very much very often until goals turn into wishes, which turn into disappointments, which slowly drift into regrets.

But goals are not engines. They are signposts. If you try to drive a goal, you’ll find in it an empty effort. Goals point us in a particular direction. They identify a desired trajectory. And they inspire us to align our efforts to that aim.

But they can’t take you to themselves any more than a mountain can take you to its summit. Goals are the result. They don’t take you there. They can’t. Not only are they not the engine, they have no engine.

But habits do. Habits are the engines that move us to our goals.

How to Miss the Mark

Most forgotten or otherwise missed goals are not about a lack of desire. They are about predictable friction, both psychological and practical, that are built into how people set them.

So, the following are 4 ways to guarantee missing your target:

1. Aim at outcomes and ignore the process

Outcomes are seductive. They feel exciting, new and measurable. They are exotic and sexy and hold our attention. Sometimes for hours or days and weeks at a time.

• “Lose 20 pounds.”
• “Write a book.”
• “Start a business.”
• “Earn my first million.”
• “Be more present with my family.”

But outcomes don’t tell you what to do at 6:30 in the morning when your brain is foggy and your day is already screaming for attention.

But habit do.

You can’t habituate losing 20 pounds. But you can habituate eating a daily salad and going to the gym 5 times a week.

The habit solution doesn’t ask, “What do I want?” It asks, “What can I do daily that makes what I want inevitable?”

We don’t daydream about habits. We dream about the end result, the condition, the outcome, the goal. It’s time we start dreaming about habits! They are the stuff goals are made of.

2. Underestimate time, resistance, and the real you

Your “goal-self” is ambitious, organized, and emotionally stable. Your “Tuesday-self” is tired, distracted, and slightly irritated by everyone who breathes too loudly.

Goals are often designed for a version of you that doesn’t consistently show up.

Habits are designed for the version of you who actually lives your life. Effective habits, in fact, are designed for the very worst version of yourself. For the weakest you. The lamest you. The loserest you. Fix your habits and the rest fixes itself.

3. Try to run on motivation (an unreliable source of fuel)

Motivation is like a friend who is inspirational at lunch and unavailable when you’re moving furniture.

When motivation dips—as it always does—you need a system that still keeps the gears turning. Goals that rely on motivation are like a watch that ticks only when it feels like it.

Author of Tiny Habits and founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, BJ Fogg, developed a behavior model that makes this plain: Behavior happens when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt converge at the same moment (“B = MAP”). If the behavior doesn’t happen, one of those elements is missing. And if one of those elements is missing, you are much less likely to engage in the consistent behavior that produces the desired result.

Translation: when your plan relies on high motivation, you build your goals on sand.

4. Forget that habits are physical grooves, not moral wishes

Habits are not merely “choices.” They are patterns reinforced by repetition, environment, and cues.

Research on habit formation in everyday life found that building automaticity takes time. A widely cited report from UCL summarizing Phillippa Lally’s work notes it takes an average of 66 days to form a habit (with significant variation depending on behavior and person).

So when someone quits after 12 days because “it’s not sticking,” they’re really not necessarily failing. They’re just misreading the timeline.

A note on the timeline principle:

It is important to remember that the timeline only matters because it suggests more repetitions. But the real creator of habits is the number of times you repeat it. You will create a habit much faster by repeating a desired behavior 100 times a day for a week than repeating the same behavior once every other day for a year.

The point is, of course, that repetition matters. The more days in a row your repeat a desired behavior, the faster that habit will, well, become a habit.

5. Treat a slip-up as a verdict

Most people don’t fail because they slip. They fail because they interpret the slip as identity.

• “I missed a day” becomes “I’m not disciplined.”
• “I ate poorly” becomes “I’m hopeless.”
• “I didn’t write again today” becomes “I’m a lazy procrastinator.”

One bad day becomes the legal argument for giving up, an indictment, a verdict.

Habits require a different mindset: a slip-up is a data point, not a diagnosis. It reminds us what to do next, not who we are because of what we didn’t do last.

The Habit Solution: turn any goal into a daily system

Here’s the shift:

Goals are achieved when they are converted into habits—small actions, done consistently, anchored to real cues, in a supportive environment, with a plan for setbacks.

That’s the framework. Now let’s make it usable.

Step 1: Write the goal, then translate it into behavior

Start with the outcome, but don’t stop there. Identify what you’ll aim at, but string the bow.

Goal: “Lose 20 pounds.”
Behavior translation: “Walk 30 minutes after dinner 5 days/week + at least 2 nutrient-dense meals + no sugary drinks.”

Goal: “Write a book.”
Behavior translation: “Write 300 words every weekday at 6:30 a.m.”

Goal: “Save money.”
Behavior translation: “Auto-transfer $75 every Friday + no eating out Mon–Thu.”

Outcomes don’t happen. Behaviors do. The good news is that behaviors produce outcomes. Manage the behavior and you’ve effectively managed the outcome.

If you can’t describe the behavior, you don’t have a plan yet—you have a wish vaguely identified. Tighten your wishes into actionable steps. That’s step #1.

Step 2: Choose one keystone habit that pulls other habits behind it

A keystone habit is one habit you choose on purpose because it triggers other good behaviors with less effort. It works like leverage. You push one place, and several things move.

Why it works

1. It reduces decision load. When you anchor a routine, you stop renegotiating basics each day.
2. It changes your identity cues. You start thinking, “I’m the kind of person who does this,” and then your choices tend to start lining up.
3. It improves your environment and timing. Many keystone habits happen early or happen first, so they shape what comes next.
4. It creates quick wins. Small follow-throughs build trust in yourself, which makes the next habit easier.

A keystone habit is the first domino in a line. Tip it and the rest fall in order.

Examples
Sleep routine as a keystone: You set a firm lights-out time and a short wind-down. The next day you wake up on time, skip late-night snacking, have more patience, train with more energy, and rely less on caffeine.

Meal prep as a keystone: Chop vegetables on Sunday and put them ready-to-go in the fridge. You eat fewer impulse snacks, hit your nutrition goals, save money, feel better in workouts, and avoid the “what should we do for dinner” stress … and cost.

Weekly review as a keystone: Every Sunday you plan the week by choosing three priorities and blocking time. You procrastinate less, say no faster, follow through more, and feel less scattered.

Pick one habit that naturally sits upstream of your biggest problems. Make it small, repeatable, and tied to a clear time and place.

Some habits create time, energy, and better choices. When you lock one of those in, other behaviors follow with less effort. If you choose too many at once, you’ll create a motivational bonfire that burns hot and dies fast.

Step 3: Make the habit small enough to start on your worst day

If your habit requires you to feel inspired, it isn’t a habit. It’s a performance.

Start embarrassingly small if needed, not because you lack potential, but because you understand physics.

Small habits reduce the “Ability” barrier in the Motivation/Ability/Prompt equation (see Fogg’s behavior model).

Small is not weak. Small is repeatable. And repeatable is what compounds.

If you can’t get yourself to eat a nutrient-dense salad everyday, can you open a bag of mixed salad greens?

That’s it. Only open it. Put it back and grab the candy bar if you choose. Your initiating step is only to open the bag. Good chance, on most days, what follows the opening is pouring. Then eating.

Step 4: Anchor it to a reliable cue (and create a clear prompt)

A habit floating in open air rarely sticks. A habit attached to something that already happens has traction.

Examples:

• After I brush my teeth, I’ll take out my dental floss.
• After I clean up after breakfast, I’ll write 50 words.
• After I sit in my car at work, I’ll take 3 slow breaths and set a “first task.”
• After dinner, I’ll walk once around the block.

This is where “if-then planning” becomes powerful. Implementation intentions, which are clear plans that connect a situation (“if”) to an action (“then”), have strong evidence behind them. One review notes that forming implementation intentions can substantially improve initiating the process of striving for a goal (see Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).

You’re not trying to be heroic. You’re trying to be automatic.

Step 5: Design the environment so the right thing is easy

Environment beats personality more often than we’d like to admit.

If you want to read more:

• Put the book on your pillow.
• Put the phone in another room.
• Make the “default evening” reading, not scrolling.

If you want to eat better:

• Make healthy food visible and convenient.
• Make junk inconvenient and less available.

If you want to write:

• Create a writing station.
• Remove friction: open the document, outline ready, timer set.

Discipline is often just friction management.

Step 6: Track the habit, not the outcome

Outcomes lag. Habits lead.

Weight changes after consistent behavior.
A book appears after consistent words.
Savings grow after consistent transfers.

Track what you control daily. Use a simple “don’t break the chain” calendar, a checklist, or a habit app—whatever makes consistency visible.

You’re not tracking to shame yourself. You’re tracking to stay honest. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, has an iron-clad rule: Don’t miss twice.

Step 7: Build a relapse plan

The most dangerous belief in goal pursuit is this: “This will go perfectly.”

No, it won’t.

So decide in advance what you will do when life happens. And life will inevitably happen to us very human-like humans.

• If I miss a day, I restart the next day with the smallest version.
• If I miss a week, I do a “reset weekend” and re-establish my cue.
• If I fall off completely, I rebuild with a 7-day sprint of tiny habits.

A relapse plan turns setbacks from identity crises into routine maintenance.

Why the Habit Lens Works: the compounding effect you can’t fake

Habits work for the same reason character does. It compounds.

A single workout doesn’t change your body.
A single page doesn’t write a book.
A single budget decision doesn’t build wealth.
A single act of presence doesn’t heal a relationship.

But repeated acts—small acts—day after day after day, become a force.

Habits are not dramatic. They are not Instagrammable. They are not thrilling after week three.

They are, however, powerful in the way glaciers are powerful: slow and steady, reshaping landscapes over time.

When people finally “become disciplined,” it’s rarely because they discovered a new motivational quote. It’s because they built a system that made discipline less necessary.

A Definitive Blueprint: build goals the way builders build bridges

Let me give you a simple structure you can reuse for any goal—fitness, writing, relationships, spiritual life, finances, whatever.

The Bridge Method

A bridge doesn’t appear because you desire the other side. It appears because you lay down supports.

1) Define the “other side” clearly
Make it approach-oriented when possible (“build X” rather than “stop Y”). Approach goals show higher success rates than avoidance goals (see the research here).

2) Lay the first plank (a tiny habit)
What is the smallest daily action that counts? (make it easy to do)

3) Add supports (cue + environment)
What will trigger it? What will make it easy? (make it easy to remember)

4) Add guardrails (if-then + relapse plan)
What will you do when obstacles show up? (make it easy to get back to)

5) Walk it daily (tracking + weekly review)
Weekly review is where achievers separate from wishful thinkers. (make it easy to track)

6) Celebrate (make doing the habit feel good)

Dopamine reinforced habits stick better than will-power enforced habits (make it easy to like)

This is how you stop “missing goals” and start building inevitability.

Practical Examples: turn common goals into habit systems

Goal: Get in shape

Habit system

• Anchor: After dinner, walk 10 minutes (more if you choose to)
• Environment: shoes by the door, playlist ready
• Progression: add 2 minutes every week
• Strength: Mon/Wed/Fri, 12-minute home routine
• Relapse plan: if missed, do a 5-minute minimum next day

You’re not training your body first. You’re training consistency. The body will come only once the consistency is established.

Goal: Write a book

Habit system

• Anchor: After washing face, write 200 words
• Rule: no editing during writing block
• Environment: phone in another room, document opened night before
• Weekly review: outline the next week’s scenes Sunday night
• Relapse: if you miss 2 days, restart with 100 words

Books are written by people who show up even when the inspiration is late.

Goal: Improve your marriage / relationships

Habit system

• Daily: 10 minutes of undistracted conversation (phones down)
• Weekly: one “walk-and-talk” or date ritual
• Repair habit: apologize within 24 hours after conflict
• Anchor: after kids are in bed → 10-minute check-in
• Track: simple “did we connect today?” yes/no

Relationships don’t collapse from one argument. They collapse from a thousand days of emotional neglect.

Goal: Become more spiritually grounded

Habit system

• Anchor: same chair, same time, 8 minutes minimum
• Prompt: leave scriptures/journal open the night before
• Structure: 3 minutes read, 3 minutes ponder, 2 minutes prayer
• Weekly review: one longer session on Sunday
• Relapse: if missed, do 2 minutes rather than nothing

The goal is not “perfect devotion.” The goal is “consistent contact.”

The Deeper Reason Habits Succeed: they change identity

Goals ask, “What do I want?”
Habits quietly answer, “Who am I becoming?”

When you repeat an action, you cast a vote for a kind of self.

• Every time you write, you become a writer.
• Every time you walk, you become someone who values health.
• Every time you tell the truth, you become honest.
• Every time you restart after failure, you become resilient.

This is why habits are more transformative than the raw pursuit of a goal. Habits build self-respect. They teach you that your word matters and that it matters to yourself.

And self-respect is jet fuel.

It’s hard to build a meaningful life when you don’t trust yourself. Habits restore trust by providing evidence—small, daily pieces of circumstantial evidence—that you follow through. The goal is where you’re going. Habits are the steps you take to get there. Taking the steps builds confidence that the goal is inevitable. You see and feel the daily movement in the direction you chose to aim. That builds trust.

The Most Common Habit Mistakes (and how to fix them)

Mistake 1: You start too big

Fix: reduce the habit until it’s almost absurd. You can scale later. Consistency first. Make it almost too easy to not do. Only then raise the bar.

Mistake 2: You rely on vague timing

“I’ll do it tomorrow” is not a plan; it’s a lullaby. There’s a little poem my dad once sent me. I committed it to memory a long time ago. It goes like this: Procrastination is a funny thing. It only brings me sorrow. But I can change at any time. I think I will. Tomorrow!

But tomorrows never come. They are always, eternally and stubbornly one day away. And so will your habit be until you specify your timing.

Fix: specify the cue: After X, I will do Y for Z minutes.

Mistake 3: You don’t plan for obstacles

Fix: write two if-then plans:

• If time is short, then I do the minimum.
• If motivation is low, then I start with two minutes.

Mistake 4: You track outcomes and despair

Failure doesn’t feel good. That compounds too. But the more we focus on what we didn’t accomplish, what we missed or forgot or felt too week to finish, the more that is the focus of our thoughts and the less we focus on the next step.

Similarly, as you track an outcomes, it’s easy to become discouraged. Gaining 20 pounds of muscle (an outcome) won’t show daily improvement. That can make the difference between continuing and giving up when day after day shows no change. This is particularly important at the beginning as you’re still trying to establish the habit and its own internal reward system.

Fix: track the behavior. Outcomes will follow. This is agriculture, not magic. You are planting seeds of behavior, not waving wands that transform instantaneously.

Mistake 5: You interpret failure as identity

How you see yourself determines what you do. Runners run. Writers write. If you identify yourself as someone who quits or is week or unworthy or incapable, you will be less able to sustain the habit that you don’t see yourself being able to sustain. It’s a vicious cycle. But one that can be ended.

Fix: treat failure as feedback. Data. Information to examine. Adjust the system. Restart quickly.

A 14-day “Habit Conversion” Challenge

If you want to stop reading about change and start changing, do this for two weeks.

Day 1: Write your goal as an approach statement (“build X”).
Day 2: Translate it into one daily behavior.
Day 3: Shrink it to a minimum version you can do on your worst day.
Day 4: Choose a cue you already do daily.
Day 5: Design the environment (remove friction, add prompts).
Day 6: Write two if-then plans.
Day 7: Track it simply (checkbox).
Day 8: Add a tiny reward or “celebration” to reinforce completion.
Day 9: Identify the most likely obstacle; adjust now.
Day 10: Add a weekly review (just 10 minutes).
Day 11: Tell one supportive person your system (not your goal).
Day 12: Miss on purpose—then practice your relapse plan.
Day 13: Increase difficulty by 5–10% (only if consistent).
Day 14: Write a one-paragraph identity statement: “I am the kind of person who…”

If you do this seriously, you’ll have something most people never build: a goal that has been converted into a system and a system that becomes something close to automatic.

The Truth You May Not Want—but probably need

You keep missing your goals for the same reason most people do: you keep trying to win the war with occasional battles.

Goals are not maintained by occasional intensity. They are maintained by daily structure. You don’t form a habit by the number of days that pass. You form a habit my the number of times you repeat it.

The good news is not that you can become a different person overnight.

The good news is far better: you don’t have to.

You can become a different person the way all lasting change happens—quietly, repeatedly, faithfully—through habits that compound.

And if you want one line to remember when you’re tempted to quit, let it be this:

Stop asking whether you feel like it. Start asking whether this is the kind of person you are.

Because in the end, the definitive guide to achieving goals is not a secret technique.

It’s a simple, demanding, liberating truth:

“You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” —James Clear

Photo courtesy of pixabay

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” — Dalai Lama

Happiness is one of the most pursued—and most misunderstood—goals we aim at. It is the object of countless new year’s resolutions and Google searches and prayers. We chase it the way we chase mirages: convinced that if we just reach that milestone, buy that thing, fix that problem, happiness will finally settle in and stay for a while. If we can just reach far enough and grasp desperately enough and grip the thing tightly enough, we won’t wake up yet another day with happiness once again slipping through our grasping fingers like so much smoke and ashes. But the harder we pursue happiness as a feeling, the more elusive it becomes.

That’s because happiness is not a feeling you capture. It’s a skill you practice.

Why Chasing Happiness Backfires

Psychologically, the direct pursuit of happiness is often self-defeating. When happiness is treated as a destination, every ordinary moment feels like a failure. We begin to monitor our emotional state with anxious vigilance: Am I happy yet? Shouldn’t I feel better than this? What’s wrong with me? Or my marriage? Or my job? Or my kids? Every moment becomes an indictment, a diagnosis and a judgment.

Research consistently shows that people who place a high value on “feeling happy” tend to experience more disappointment, not less. The problem is not wanting a good life. It’s confusing happiness with constant positive emotion. Emotions are weather, not climate. They shift, pass, return, and vanish again. Expecting them to remain sunny is like blaming the sky for clouds.

Ironically, the more tightly we grip happiness, the more it slips through our fingers. Like squeezing sand, the effort itself becomes the reason more of it falls from our hands.

Pleasure, Contentment, and Meaning Are Not the Same Thing

Part of the confusion comes from imprecise language. We use the word happiness to describe radically different experiences.

Pleasure is immediate and sensory: food, entertainment, comfort, novelty. It’s real and valuable for sure, but fleeting. It stays only about as long as the thing producing it. Besides, the nervous system adapts to pleasure quickly. What excites today becomes baseline tomorrow.

Contentment is quieter. It’s the absence of agitation. It’s acceptance. A sense that, in this moment, nothing is urgently wrong. Contentment doesn’t shout; it hums. It invites peace.

Meaning is different altogether. Meaning often involves effort, sacrifice, and even discomfort. It comes from responsibility embraced, values lived, character developed and growth earned. Meaning doesn’t always feel good—but it feels right.

When we collapse all three into the single word happiness, we sabotage ourselves and dilute the meaning of an important principle, making it all but meaningless, and certainly harder to find. We end up expecting cheesecake to deliver the fulfillment of character—and wonder why it doesn’t.

Habituation: Why More Is Rarely Better

One of the most robust findings in psychology is the idea of hedonic adaptation. Human beings rapidly adjust to improved circumstances. Raises, new cars, compliments, achievements all provide a temporary emotional boost before returning us to our baseline. The most obvious example is what happens to the happiness of Lotto winners about a year or so after becoming instantly and ridiculously rich. Their self-reported happiness falls back to about where it was before winning.

This isn’t a flaw. It’s a feature. Habituation allows us to survive change without being overwhelmed. But it also means that building a happy life by stacking pleasures is like filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

If happiness were merely a function of circumstances, the wealthiest and most comfortable societies in history would be drowning in joy. They aren’t.

What does change long-term well-being is not what happens to us, but how we relate to what happens.

The stoic philosopher Epictetus said it this way almost 2,000 years ago: “Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinions of the things that happen.”

Emotional Regulation: The Hidden Skill

Emotionally healthy people are not happier because they feel good more often or for longer durations of time. They are happier because they recover from challenges faster, interpret their circumstances more wisely, and respond to life more deliberately.

Emotional regulation—the ability to notice feelings without being ruled by them—is one of the strongest predictors of long-term well-being. This doesn’t mean suppressing emotion. It means engaging with it skillfully, the way a seasoned sailor works with the wind rather than cursing it.

The goal is not emotional perfection or emotional numbness or emotional ignorance, but emotional competence.

Daily Practices That Actually Work

Happiness, like strength, responds to training. Not grand gestures. It’s daily reps that make the incremental difference.

• Attention training: What you consistently notice becomes your experience. You see what you look for. What you pay attention to becomes the context for everything you do and interact with. Practices like gratitude journaling work not because life changes, but because perception does. You begin to see what was already there. You start looking for what you had, until then, largely taken for granted. The invisible becomes more than just visible; it becomes tangible.

• Values-based action: Acting in alignment with your principles—even when inconvenient—builds meaning. Meaning stabilizes happiness far better than pleasure ever could. Pleasure is something you experience. It goes away. Character is who you most fundamentally are.

• Physical regulation: Sleep, movement, nutrition, and breathing directly affect emotional range. You cannot think your way out of a nervous system problem. Working to improve those habits will go a long way in habituating and stabilizing that emotional range.

• Service and contribution: Well-being reliably increases when attention shifts from self-monitoring to purposeful contribution. Self-absorption is a terrible happiness strategy. But living a meaningful life of service knowing others are better off because of the life you chose to live is a wonderful and research-confirmed strategy for greater stores of happiness.

• Self-compassion: Treating yourself with the same fairness you extend to others reduces rumination and emotional volatility. Harsh self-judgment masquerades as motivation but corrodes joy. We all know the toll harsh criticism has on any other relationship, but somehow think it’s fine when aimed at the mirror. Instead, treat yourself like you would your own child, like you matter, like you would someone you deeply cared about.

These practices don’t eliminate hardship. They make it navigable. They don’t guarantee smooth sailing. They keep the boat afloat. They don’t stop it from raining. They help make the rain largely irrelevant to the voyage.

Training Happiness Like Any Other Muscle

No one walks into a gym, lifts once, and demands lifelong fitness. Yet we expect happiness to arrive and remain without discipline or practice.

Happiness training looks mundane from the outside. It’s repetition. It’s incremental. It’s showing up. It’s choosing responses instead of reactions. It’s building emotional muscle memory through small, daily acts.

Some days you’ll feel strong. Some days you won’t. Strength still grows.

Happiness isn’t the absence of struggle. It’s the presence of skill.

And like any skill worth having, it is earned—not chased, not demanded, but practiced—quietly, consistently, and over time.

I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo courtesy of pixabay

“I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long …. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.”

–James Baldwin (American Novelist)

It’s that time of year when winds howl and creatures creep and movies of monsters and dark and loathsome things proliferate. It’s a month of fright nights and haunted houses, when scary things decorate porches and dangle from neighborhood trees.

When I was a kid, I loved vampire and werewolf movies, Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I watched movies about aliens attacking earth and giant ants, psycho birds, and The Blob oozing and destroying life as we knew it.

I loved the scare and spine-tingling rush of it all.

But all that Halloween-ness of the month doesn’t scare me anymore because, well, I know it’s fake—so much stage blood, costumes and special effects.

Still, I have to confess that there are creeping creatures in the darkened shadows of life that still scare me. And this is the month that seems appropriate to share them with you.

The following are 9 Moral Monsters that still scare me…

1.  I Fear the Zombie-like State of Spiritual Apathy

When we set no spiritual goals and aim at no moral improvement, working on no Christ-like qualities, we have surrendered to inertia.

When we just go through the motion of discipleship without the heart and soul of discipleship, we turn into something resembling the walking dead, shells of who we could become, half-filled vessels of unmet potential.

When we walk without sincerity, act without purpose, and do without caring, we forfeit the life that a sincere walk produces.

We then become the living-lifeless, the almost-alive, not really living, but not yet dead, stumbling through our days instead of running toward what’s good and beautiful, worthy, inspiring and meaningful.

We risk becoming numb to the Spirit, feeling hallow in our worship and stagnated along the covenant path.

Then resentment and disaffection creep in like so many spiders spinning webs of discontent in what could otherwise be the vibrancy of a Spirit-led life.

So let’s cast off our zombie-ness and put on the whole armor of God.

Stand up and stand tall and move decidedly toward our Savior, along the gospel path, purposefully, intentionally, faithfully, imperfectly for sure, but resolutely nonetheless.

Aim at the next step in our discipleship and move a foot forward toward it. Set a goal and take action.

Read and ponder eternal truths that have eternal ramifications with spiritually igniting effect. Expand and deepen your prayer life. Seek inspiration and personal revelation.

Awaken the spiritual giant within as you fill your life with the Living Waters of Christ and His gospel.

Do this and watch apathy transform into spiritual anticipation, into faith and joy as the Light of Christ returns life and light to the soul.

2. I Fear the Vampire of Perfectionism

This pernicious fiend sucks the lifeblood from the soul as our inevitable lack and failure to live up to the impossibly precise and unwavering standard of Christ-like perfection.

Ironically, the pursuit of perfect prevents us from enjoying what falls short of that ideal. The very attitude that elevates our aim moves the target to the realm of unattainability.

Perfectionism impedes progress by constantly moving the target further out of reach and often out of sight, not as an incentive to keep going or to try harder, but as an indictment for not reaching the unreachable and a sentence of self-contempt for not being what’s currently impossible to be.

It can produce nothing but discouragement and disillusion. It is a weight that oppresses as we inevitably fall self-condemnably short.

This ever-thirsty vampire sucks the life out of worship as we hear all the things we’re not doing and watch all the people we think are so much better than us.

As the fangs of perfectionism sink deeper into the jugular of our discipleship, every talk, lesson, and sermon becomes a condemnation and every testimony a judgment of shame.

Inspiration becomes the sun we cannot bear; scripture becomes the cross we cannot tolerate; church becomes the mirror in whose image we can no longer see ourselves.

Perfectionism demands the undemandable and expects the impossible.

Perfectionism mistakes the commandments as a verdict and misinterprets the gospel as an anvil against which the hammer of eternal Truth pounds us to pieces.

We read about love, but experience contempt. We participate in lessons about forgiveness, but condemn ourselves for needing to use it.

As perfection is the standard against which we judge others and ourselves, satisfaction and joy, peace of mind and the joy of gospel living are never fully experienced.

We then risk sinking into the caverns of self-contempt and burying ourselves in the coffins of our self-assessed worthlessness.

Or we retaliate with angry contempt against the church for the pain we experience at the hands of our perfectionism, not realizing it was never the gospel or the Lord or His church doing the pounding that caused the pain.

The only cure, like in all vampire movies, is to drive a stake right through the heart of perfectionism. The beast must be killed to free us from it’s vampiric clutches.

So accept the reality of human nature in a fallen world. Accept our fallibility as an inherent characteristic of our humanness.

Accept the reality of our divine potential but also the reality that our potential will never be fully met in this life.

Realize that the only path forward is one step at a time.

Remember that the gospel of Jesus Christ is an incremental process of discipleship, that our Savior was presented before the foundations of the world precisely because our perfect God knew our imperfection would require it.

And let’s apply ALL the principles of the gospel to ourselves.

Obedience is one of those principles, but so is patience. Righteousness is one, but so is repentance. Discipleship is one, but so is compassion. Enduring to the end is one, but so is the injunction to not run faster than you have strength to.

Do what you can without condemning yourself for what you can’t. Strive forward even while accepting yourself and others where you and they currently are.

3. I Worry about the Plight of the Invisible Man

I worry about the invisibility of those who sit alone, who feel unseen, who walk in the shadows of life.

These invisible men and women, youth and children stand in plain view and are missed, veiled glimmers of people we sort of remember but haven’t embraced. They blend into the background, sitting quietly unnoticed.

I’m afraid of what that might mean about the sighted, the faithful, and the ordained whose eyes overlook the unseen.

The elixir that brings the ignored and forgotten into focus, that gives substance to their invisibility is love.

As we grow in our capacity to love, as we learn to reach out more authentically with love, as we trust that love is more important than routines, preferences and comfort zones, we will begin to see the unseen with a clarity that invites them out of the shadows and into the light.

That’s when we will finally be moved to seek out those living in the shadows of their faith, where we can help them turn on the lights of the gospel, where they will no longer be secrets and shadows, but living disciples in the Living Church of Jesus Christ.

4. I Fear the Witchery of Judgmentalism

When possessed by this peculiar witchcraft, we tend to look down the long and crooked noses of contempt at others’ imperfections.

The warts of our intolerance and moles of our lack of compassion disfigures our relationships and renders us obstacles to our neighbors’ progress.

The spells of criticism that boil and bubble from the cauldron of judgment, like so many rats, bats and black cats, creeps and crawls through families and congregations and neighborhoods infecting the culture with detachment, distrust and disunity.

Contention is its Frankenstein Monster.

Humility is the only counter-spell to the brooding witchery of judgmentalism. To be meek in the face of others’ weaknesses is to accept their fundamental humanity and to connect ours to theirs.

To judge another is to ride the broom of self-righteousness to absurd heights, levitating our judgment above Christ who suffered for our brokenness and doesn’t need our help adjudicating the worthiness of those for whom He already paid the dreadful price.

Christ’s payment in blood does not need the usury tax of our criticism, as though His sacrifice did not quite go far enough and our added self-righteousness is the final push Christ’s atonement was lacking.

No, our debt has been paid in full. His atonement was complete and needs no prison guards of contempt whipping stragglers at the back of the repentance line.

In fact, our judgmentalism means that we’re likely right behind them (perhaps very far behind them) in that same line anyway!

Judgmentalism fuels the oozing wounds of hate that cut the jagged scars of intolerance into the fleshy walls of our critical hearts.

It is the path of personal destruction that corrupts the soul and moves us closer to the cliff’s edge.

The way back to spiritual safety is to stop focusing so much on everyone else’s warts, moles and crooked noses and to focus on the good and positive in people instead. Replace judgment with honest praise for qualities we train ourselves to see.

Replace complaint with heartfelt gratitude for the blessings we learn to recognize from those we used to complain about.

Refuse to cast spells of criticism, no matter how “constructive” we think they are.

Instead, learn to see others through God’s eyes, as He sees them. Train yourself to recognize others as children of God, the spark of divinity within, all doing the best we know how.

Don’t get me wrong—there is a place for honest feedback under circumstances that may even require that you offer it. Still, love and humility should be the larger context within which we reluctantly share our thoughtful critique.

Judgmentalism turned inward is the perfectionism of self-contempt. Judgmentalism turned outward is the perfectionism of the contempt for others.

We thereby demand a standard we have no right to impose and judge others unworthy for failing to live up to the standard we had no right to measure them by.

Judgmentalism delivers the poisoned apple of disdain, disguised as a healthy snack.

As already mentioned, the antidote to this poison is to change how we truly see each other. So go find the silver lining of decency and good intentions in the dark clouds of our former prejudice.

Otherwise, we remain stuck in the toxic fog of judgment, clouding our perspective and discoloring our ability to see others as they truly are.

As we rid ourselves of this bewitching habit, we will finally be able to set aside the self-imposed responsibility of uncovering everyone else’s sins and weaknesses. 

We will then finally be able to shift the weight and burden of shouldering others’ sin to the only Shoulders ever meant to carry them.

5. I Fear the Creeping, Clawing Rats of Sin

I know that rats aren’t technically monsters, but I can confidently say that they’ve been in every monster movie I’ve ever seen, adding significantly to the intended creep factor. Besides, sin can deliver some pretty monstrous consequences itself.

The rats of sin trap and cripple, corrupt and enslave.

These vile rodents nibble away at our true identity, creating a gap between us and our God.

The holes they gnaw into the walls of our character makes us believe we are no longer worthy to pray, unqualified to receive His blessings or guidance.

The vermin of sin undermines faith, testimony and conviction, as we stumble and stutter along the covenant path less confidently than before.

Still, we all fall victim to it. Our Savior paid the price for it. The covenant path leads us away from it.

But when rat-like sin is allowed to hide in the corners of our lives, in the dark and shadowed places of our souls, scurrying behind walls and creeping under floorboards and scratching around in attics where shame and guilt fester, sin tends to nest and spread as these rats dig deeper into the tunnels and basements of our lives.

If left alone, the infestation can grow larger and more eradicable, allowing sin to scratch and claw at our peace of mind and chew gaping holes into our weakening faith and testimonies.

As sin burrows under and through and around the structures of our lives, those structures become weaker, less reliable, more susceptible to other insecurities.

Sin begins to gnaw at our self-confidence, esteem and respect, turning us from God to the world where nothing fully satisfies and bellies are never truly filled with ultimate purpose and meaning and the kind of joy that endures.

The only proper extermination of sin is the admixture of God’s love and grace, Christ’s atoning sacrifice, our repentant and willing heart, and faith and hope in Christ.

That’s a reliable pest control that changes hearts, lifts spirits and reshapes our hopes and desires.  

The sooner that potent potion is applied, the easier the process of eradicating these rats will be.

We all have a few rats running around in the attic of our souls that we will never fully eradicate.

The point is not to overdramatize the effects of what you might call run-of-the-mill moral inadequacies and spiritual deficiencies—even though such weaknesses are part of the path we’re on and should not be left unattended.

The point is to point out the intent and motivation of the father of all lies and the architect of all sin. It is to help us remember that sin is not neutral.

Sin is not passive or patient or moderate in all things. It doesn’t let up or let go. It doesn’t rest, take naps, or go on vacation. It is relentless.

In fact, sin scampers and hides, gnaws and infests in rat-like packs of temptation.

It breads disease and fear and death. Avoid it like the plague it is. Repent of sin as soon as you commit it. Then commit to do just a little bit better next time.

Lean on the word of God and connect deeply with Him through prayer so the spiritual rat-traps can quickly remove the clawing moral vermin from our lives, one rat at a time.

That’s all it really takes. It’s those small daily adjustments that keeps us squarely on the covenant path most of the time. And that path is indeed a very good path to be on.

6. I Fear Apocalyptic Outbreaks of Contagion

From the 1964 thriller, The Last Man Standing, to Outbreak and Contagion, to I Am Legend and World War Z, Halloween has had its fair share of viral outbreak movies.

Our current pandemic adds relevance to the moment.

But the viral outbreak that scares me most is one that infects hearts and minds and marriages.

I fear the disease of carnal decay, the addiction of pornographic rot that eats away at the spiritual nature of our souls, robbing us of our confident walk along the covenant path.

This viral outbreak of epidemic proportions corrupts honesty in the darkness of deceit, hidden in the night of our shame.

It transforms its victims into zombie-like slaves of appetite, flesh-crawling souls of bottomless hunger for the lurid, corrupt and immoral.

It spiritually maims and morally softens our will to fight and endure. It cripples our discipleship and disrupts our spiritual progress.

It weakens our moral agency and supplants testimony with spirituals apathy.

It robs us of irreplaceable hours and lost ambition. It dims future prospects of possibility, and lengthens and complicates pathways forward.

Trust, confidence and hope bleed from its open wounds. It insidiously darkens reality by forcing it to compete with the corrupting influence of airbrushed fantasy.

In that state of moral vertigo, where spiritual foundations start to slip and slide and we feel the moral landscape shifting underfoot, it becomes easy to lose an eternal perspective in a mortal life.

When our spiritual immune system has been compromised by the habit of carnal desires, it becomes exponentially more difficult to feel the reconfirming impressions of the Holy Ghost.

Spiritual assurances can then start to waver and the world can start looking like an increasingly attractive alternative to the demands of discipleship.

These are spiritually perilous times. Just as we cannot serve God and Mammon, we also cannot continue walking the covenant path in sin without losing sight of where we’re supposed to be going.

The two are fundamentally incompatible.

Carnality corrupts our moral compass and weakens our spiritual legs along the path that we find increasingly difficult to see in the moral fog our addiction creates.

The sin we repeat starts to feel like the sin we cannot stop. And the sin we can’t stop starts to feel a lot like moral failure of a permanent kind.

That gives room for shame to accelerate the infection, making it easier to believe the lie that God has abandoned us. We feel unworthy to stand in His presence, so also feel uncomfortable standing in His church.

It’s a slippery slope of self-destructive viral contagion that must be stopped.

The best vaccination against the spread of this habitual devouring disease of self-disdain is to wash deeply in the waters of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, decisions have to be made. Since technology and privacy are the spreading agents of this disease, technology and privacy need to be considered when combatting it.

Immoral thought that sits in the poisoned well of the soul poisons other parts of the landscape as well.

One way to lessen the viral impact of the past is to dilute the effects of sin with a flood of inspiration and truth.

Read and listen, watch, pray and ponder on eternal principles until the dirty waters of the past have become so diluted that the waters of your current life taste a lot like the filtered Living Waters of Christ.

But the first step to ultimately cure any viral outbreak is to get yourself to the doctor. Christ is the Great Physician.

His grace and atoning sacrifice, His love for and acceptance of each of us—no matter where we are or what we’ve done—are emotionally cathartic and spiritually healing.

Certainly, the Great Physician calls us to higher ground, to climb the mountain of addiction to the summit of freedom, but He nonetheless accepts us as we are.

He calls us to follow Him whether it is from the prairies and deserts or the forests and grasslands, or even from the hole we’ve personally dug and then subsequently fallen into. It’s all the same.

He wants to heal and cure and bless us. He wants us to feel the intimacy of His divine and perfect love.

Only He can heal our wounds and change the substance of our character, remove the thorn from our side and transform our very nature.

Turn to Christ and let Him lift you from the plague and disease of your addiction to a progressively abundant life.

Peace, happiness, confidence, the sweetness of the Spirit, inspiration, revelation, purpose, meaning and pure joy are the fruits of this prescribed spiritual inoculation and ultimate cure.

The process of inoculation and cure is usually incremental and progressive.

Be patient as Christ heals you. Set short-range goals and celebrate each baby step of improvement, even if it’s just refraining an hour longer than usual.

Any progress is victory over the spreading disease. 

And know, most fundamentally, that you are a child of God. You are endowed with greater capacity than you think.

The moral landscape of your life may seem dark and uninviting. But that’s temporary, no matter how dark or how long it’s been that way.

All God asks is that we take the first step. Then the next.

We will stumble and fall along the way; that is part of our discipleship. That’s why Christ atoned in our past for what He knew we would do in His future.

No one learns without mistakes. No bakery has a clean kitchen.

But as you take each subsequent step, and lean on the love and grace of your Savior, even if many of those steps you take are retracing lost ground, you will eventually have climbed the rocky terrain of this mountain in your life where you can finally breathe the redeeming air of spiritual freedom.

It is on your horizon, beckoning you toward it.

When Jesus invited us to follow Him, He never expected all of us to follow at the same pace or in lockstep with His. But He does expect us to follow nonetheless. I pray this will be your call to action.

7. I Fear the Blob of Stagnation

The Blob was a science-fiction horror movie in 1958 that depicted an alien blob of gooey proportions spreading slowly, methodically, but ever lethally through a city, engulfing and smothering everything in its oozing, expanding blob-ness.

We too are susceptible to alien attacks from the gooey grips of laziness, where we are slowly suffocated by The Blob of our own unchosen options. 

When we stop moving forward, stop learning and striving and becoming, we allow The Blob of procrastination and atrophy to set in.

It’s then that the gangrenous loss of will-power and self-discipline stops us from taking the shape and form we were meant to occupy.

We are created in the image of God.

That’s not a mere physical reality. We were also created in the image of who we could become.

To stagnate on the couch of life is to forfeit that potentiality and allow who we could have been to bleed into the gutter of regret.

To end that slow bleed of potential, begin today to aim at something worth aiming at and then take your first steps toward it.

Discipline yourself to learn and grow. Read and think. Write and pray. Love and serve. Organize your life around incremental steps toward your ideal self.

Cut back on watching so much TV or YouTube, social media, Netflix or whatever undemanding devices of delay are preventing you from becoming more than you were yesterday or last year.

You were meant for amazing, so go start building something that leans in that direction.

Of course your first or even twenty-first build will crash and burn. Maybe all of them will to one degree or another, but so what! Build anyway.

What’s the alternative? Build nothing? Become nothing more than you currently are?

No, that’s to miss the point of our creation. So work hard and aim the best you know how at the best thing you know to aim at. And then adjust as you go.

Choose a talent and develop it. Choose a hobby and work at it. Choose a subject to explore, a project to accomplish, a trait to acquire, a weakness to overcome.

It doesn’t really matter what you choose to do because doing almost anything productive is better than sitting like a blob on the couch of life in wait of some epiphany or revelation to push you forward.

Epiphanies and personal revelation, by the way, are much more likely to come while in the act of becoming and doing.

So become and do. What else is there, after all?

8. I Fear the Self-fulfilling Prophecy of Self-doubt

Like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, it lurks in the dark swamp of our insecurities. It creeps through the murky waters of base comparisons where other creatures of self-contempt and self-loathing lurk.

Dark thoughts, like dark creatures, breed and multiply in dark places, then spread, scraping and clawing at our true nature and eternal potential until all that’s left is the emptied vestige of a former self.

Our divine origins are then hidden in the cold depths of spiritual confusion and misunderstanding as we sink to the bottom of the darkened waters of disbelief and gasping faith.

In that watery grave it becomes easy to get lost in the marshes of spiritual disorientation where our self-doubt creates the shackles that bind us to our lesser selves.

And yet we’re taught to love and serve each other with kindness, patience, acceptance and compassion, overlooking the flaws and imperfections of mortality, while focusing on the good in others.

We should have that same attitude turned inward as we stumble down the covenant path, no matter how imperfectly and inconsistently.

We’re taught to love our neighbors as ourselves. But harsh self-criticism is hardly the proper context for that love.

The implied scriptural assumption in loving others as we love ourselves is that we treat ourselves well, and so ought to treat others at least equally well.

And yet we often treat ourselves with something more resembling contempt than love.

We can be quite harsh and unforgiving, pummeling ourselves mercilessly for failing to measure up to some self-imposed standard.

Don’t get me wrong—standards are essential. They give us something to aim at and keep us acting within certain acceptable parameters.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is, in fact, a gospel of moral and spiritual standards. But to verbally slash the tires of our own self-regard undermines our effort to move along the straight and narrow properly and productively.

If only “he who is without sin” is authorized to throw the first stone, what makes us think we have the right to throw stones at ourselves?

Don’t allow that creature of the marshy depths to drag us down to the darkness of self-abuse, verbal or otherwise.

Instead, start treating yourself as though you were worth protecting.

Treat yourself as though you were on loan from God, as though you actually believed that you are indeed a Child of God with infinite potential.

Treat yourself as you would treat your own toddler still learning to walk by faith.

How would you treat your own flesh and blood as they wobble and stumble through life? What would you say to your own child with skinned knees and teary eyes? How would you say it?

Would you condemn and punish or lift and comfort? Would you abuse or protect? Reject or embrace? Blame or inspire? Abandon or nurture? Criticize or encourage?

Well, you are your own flesh and blood!

So, to yourself, “Go and do thou likewise.”

9. I Fear the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Hypocrisy

Dr. Jekyll was a good-natured physician who healed by day, and raged and ravaged by night. The potion he felt compelled to drink each night turned him into a monstrous beast of unbounded evil.

But his moral weakness was not what turned Jekyll into a hypocritical Hyde; Hiding Hyde was.

Hypocrisy is the peculiar state of believing no one else can see what we are pretending doesn’t exist.

Being human is not to be a hypocrite. Failing to live up to our values is not hypocrisy. It is in the pretense of virtue that hypocrisy is found. 

Pretending to be something we’re not, hiding in sin while professing a falsified image of self-righteousness is where the problem exists.

But why did Jesus mince no words in condemning Pharisaic hypocrisy? Why were His boldest condemnations saved for that particular character flaw?

Perhaps it’s because false righteousness makes the real thing appear ugly and self-serving.

Perhaps it’s because the façade of faithfulness makes a mockery of faith.

Maybe it’s because hypocrisy makes it easier to justify the wholesale rejection of the Perfect Example of all that’s good and praiseworthy.

Perhaps the hypocrisy of too many believers is responsible for too many former believers who lost their faith in the Sunday parade of costumed righteousness that was too often disrobed beyond the chapel doors.

Maybe the pretense feeds pride, which nourishes self-righteousness, which alienates those treading on newly found and still wobbly spiritual legs.

Maybe hypocrisy creates the appearance of an impossible and therefore futile attempt to measure up with too many people giving up in the false glow of the hypocrite’s self-amplification.

Christ suffered for our sins. He paid the price we couldn’t.

To fake righteousness is a bit like going into debt, getting help from a friend, then telling him afterwards that you never needed his help in the first place.

Hypocrisy is telling Jesus you don’t need His atoning sacrifice even while He’s bleeding for your hypocrisy. That kind of Jekyll and Hyde-ism looks too much like a sacrilegiously disrespectful slap.

The cure to Jekyll’s hypocritical Hyde is in the serum of truth.

It’s to tell the truth courageously, forthrightly, not as a weapon, but as a sign of respect for Truth and its Author.

It requires removing masks of deception and dismantling facades and choosing to live in the open, instead of sneaking and hiding in the shadows of half-truths and pretended appearances.

The cure is to refuse to decorate the simplicity of truth with the ornaments of pride or to over-simplify it to the point that it loses its fundamental substance.

The cure is to integrate the natural and the spiritual, while subjecting the former to the latter the best we can. It’s to live behind closed doors the same way we hope others think we live when they see us out in public.

The cure is to choose the teachability of humility over the arrogance of pride.

Courage is a prerequisite to real authenticity. Granted, it is infinitely easier to write about being genuine than to actually swing open the doors of authenticity and invite others in to see the dust and lint in the unkempt corners of our lives.

But authenticity is the true glue of connection and unity that forges inseparable bonds of love.

And that, it seems to me, is a pretty decent goal to aim at.

Final Thoughts

Moral Monsters are those creatures that sneak into hearts and corrupt souls with crippling effect. This Halloween is a good time to reconnect to what matters most in life. It’s a good time to look deeper into mirrors to find the parts of our hearts that still cling to darkness. It’s a good time to recognize that such monsters are real and are a part of who we are, but that Christ already paid the price to root out those self-harming qualities.

I invite you, with me, to lean on Him to set us free.

Art courtesy of Pixabay

I’ll tell you a dream
That I had in my sleep
A story, a vision
A reminder to keep:

I stood at the steps
Of the Heavenly Mansion
Before Pearly Gates
With deep apprehension

A pit in my gut
And the shame of my past
Filled me with dread
And remorse, and disgust.

I felt like a fraud,
A deceiver, a liar.
I’m guilty, imperfect
I’m ripe for the fire

I fall short, I am weak
Impatient, unkind
I’m lost and I’m broken
I’m spiritually blind

In my natural self
I’m worldly wicked
I stumble and fall
My landing—can’t stick it!

In darkness, a sinner
I wait for the Gate
To open up slightly
Enough for a shake …

A finger wagged at me
A disappointed tone
A groan of rejection
Not enough, all alone

A blemish, a blister
A source of great pain
Paid by the Master
A judgment of shame

As I wait, my knees quiver
My head spinning darkly
The mighty gates tremble
They part ever slightly

There in the opening
Between pearly bars
Stood a man in a robe
Shining brighter than stars

Tears fill my eyes
A lump in my throat
My knees buckle forward
I’m lost and I’m broke

I cry, “I’m unworthy!”
His presence too bright
He then steps toward me
I fall back up in fright

He reaches down to me
He lifts me and holds me
He steadies my knees
As I wait for his scolding

I cry on his shoulder
He sheds a tear too
But for me? “No!” I whisper:
“I’m unworthy of You.”

So I wait for his judgment,
For justice to strike
But he doesn’t release me
He holds me so tight

His mouth then comes close
To my ear as he claims:
“You fell short of God’s glory
You were off on your aim.”

I nodded “yes” knowing
Of course he’s correct
My eyes are cast downward
In shame and regret

Then he said it so clearly
Speaking straight to my heart
“I paid for your debt
In full; not in part

“You had faith and believed
Followed best as you could
When I asked you to try
You said that you would

“And even though mostly
Your effort was flawed
Your debt has been paid
By my love and my blood

“Sure, you’re imperfect
And sure, you are broke
But my burden was light
When you took up my yoke

“You see, I was the one
To whom you were linked
I was the one who pulled
When you’re weak

“You’re burden was light
Because I made it worth it
I am the glue that makes
broken things perfect.”

Free photo by Pixaby

“There is no obstacle too great, no challenge too difficult, that we cannot meet with faith.” -Gordon B. Hinckley

Faith is not only the substance of things hoped for which are true, and not only a principle of action, but faith is also the engine behind a righteous life and the foundation on which the gospel of Jesus Christ is made the center of our individual lives. 

It undergirds repentance and motivates progress and inspires needed change. It is the wall on which the paint of testimony is applied and the nails that hold the structure of our activity together. 

Confidence

Faith is hope for the future, confidence in covenants and promises made, power in the priesthood, fruit of the Atonement, and the step in our discipleship. It is why we open scripture and bend knee and serve and bless and persevere. 

It’s the door to baptism, the hand on the iron rod, the gas that propels us to temples and activities, on missions and the magnification of our callings and ministry. It is the cause behind the purpose and meaning of our lives and the belief in our goals and in our God.

Turn to the Source

It sturdies our walk and amplifies our commitment, lights our way and turns us to Christ, the source and substance of our faith. 

Faith points us down proper paths and opens us to innumerable blessings. It restores us and improves us and saves us. It is the substance of grace and the context of salvation. It deepens love and encourages kindness and connects us to its object.

Ebb and Flow

Faith is not something you have or have not. It exists on a scale, a range, a continuum. We experience it in degrees. It can ebb and flow, in part depending on the attention we give its ingredients. As we water it, it grows. As we neglect it, it eventually recedes. 

If yours is weak, strengthen it. If it is tired or soft and empty, awaken, embolden and fill it. Make it impervious to Babylonian temptation and Rameumptom-like rigidity and the mockery of half-truths and full lies and the drooling foolishness of faithless legions trapped in tall spacious buildings of self-congratulating pride.

The word of God is its handrail. The Spirit is its source. Prayer is the ladder that reaches it. Love is the fuel that propels it. Acceptance of the messiness of life is the undergirding context that allows it.

Now is the Time

Now is the time to commit to exercising more of it. Now is the time to secure it on eternal principles. Now is the time to question our questions and doubt our doubts and firm up our faith and step forward as a disciple of our Lord, dedicated to feasting on His word, saturating our lives with prayer, taking upon us His name, and serving as He serves, thereby refurbishing and polishing the faith that propels us forward. 

This is what faith is to me. It is a life-long quest with rich rewards along the way. It is worth the journey and the effort. I invite you to begin or to continue yours. 

Your Turn!

What does faith mean to you? Please share in the comments below.

Photo by Pixaby

“Love is the greatest of all the commandments—all others hang upon it. It is our focus as followers of the living Christ. It is the one trait that, if developed, will most improve our lives.” —Joseph B. Wirthlin

Nephi said the righteous love truth. Alma calls us to remember the song of redeeming love. Mosiah asks us to become as a child, patient and full of love. Mormon warns us of loving money more than the poor. Moroni tells us that the Comforter fills us with perfect love and that love never fails and casts out all fear.

Joseph Smith reminds us that love qualifies us for God’s work, that sanctification comes to those who love and serve God, to be not partial in love, that the priesthood is maintained by love, to show an increase of love after a rebuke and that blessings await those who love the Lord. He warns us not to let love wax cold.

Mark tells us that God is love. Christ said that loving God is the greatest commandment. He instructs us to love our enemies, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love Him by keeping His commandments and reminds us that God’s love of the world is why He sent His only begotten Son to it in the first place.

In fact, there are over 200 references of love in the Bible—more than 500 depending on the translation you use.

Love Fills our Emptiness

So what’s all the fuss about love? Well, here’s some random thoughts on the most written and sung about topic by poets and songwriters around the world from any generation:

Love fills our empty places. It motivates change and growth. It softens the impact of childhood trauma and helps steady long-held insecurities. It fixes and repairs and overcomes. It even keeps infant’s hearts beating. It sets the stage for our development and determines the difficulty or ease by which we trust and forgive others.

Love conquers, redeems, reforms, uplifts and inspires. When ours is lacking, we stumble more and fall harder. Its lack hurts marriages and damages children and breaks up friendships. Its failure is the author of hate and the womb that gives birth to enemies.

What Love Is and Isn’t

Love deepens the foundations of our psychology, the connections in our sociology and the kindness in our philosophy. Love sees beyond exteriors. It notices the lonely and the friendless. It exercises courage to stick up for the defenseless and reaches out to those who need more than they currently have. Love beautifies and expands. It reaches outward and invites inward.

It is slow to judge and quick to forgive. It is not selfish or proud or unkind. It does not covet or hate or steal or lie or turn a cold shoulder. Love, despite claims insisting otherwise, does not hurt. It’s the real or perceived loss of love that feels so bad. Jealousy is its enemy, not its proof. It doesn’t demand, it gives. Our immaturity, weaknesses, misunderstanding, insecurities and emotional histories can make it difficult to spot even when it is standing right in front of us. In that blindness, we can inadvertently pour cold water on its still-burning embers.

Love Begets Love

So, how do we develop more of it then? First, we recognize that love doesn’t come easily. It’s not a cheap trinket we pick up at the swap meet for pocket change. It requires something of us, even demands it. We can chase it away by trying to pin it down. We can diminish it by stomping on those we want it from. But we must pay the price of love if we want its benefits.

That price includes letting go of fear and grudges, forgiving and repenting, extending ourselves and seeking opportunities to develop more of it. We must push against the outer edge of comfort zones and come to the realization that the best way to get more of it is to give more of it away. Love, in fact, begets more love.

The most certain path to it is by following Christ and doing as He does. We serve and bless and minister to others. And so we work at it, fail at it, repent and work some more on it. We pray for it and pay the price for it. We study it in scripture and Conference talks.

Practice, Practice, Practice

But most of all, we practice love. Over, and over, and over and over and over again. When we get it wrong, we apologize, make amends the best we can, and try again. We learn from our mistakes and chip away at our hardened exteriors, breaking down walls and healing trauma. Authenticity and vulnerability inspire it, so courage is a necessary precondition for it.

When we open our hearts to Christ and give Him the burden of our pain and let Him lift our sins from us, we make room for more love in its purest form. That allows patience with ourselves and for others going through that process, acknowledging that we all improve gradually, by degree, one step at a time, not in a straight line, but by falling back, then stepping forward, only to fall and step forward again.

We fuel our love by looking for the best in others and ourselves. We spend time in uplifting and inspiring endeavors. We go to the temple as often as we can to serve those on the other side of the veil and to feel God’s love for us in that sacred environment as we absorb it’s light and beauty.

We invite others sitting alone to sit with us at church or in class. Or we go sit next to them. We look for opportunities to be kind and thoughtful, considerate and encouraging. The needs and wellbeing of others fills our hearts and prayers.

We recognize unity in diversity, oneness in difference and togetherness in acceptance. We recognize the importance and urgency of gathering all to Christ, no matter the background or current set of circumstances. We see the person beneath the hurt and the softness beyond the rough walls they erect to shield their pain. We celebrate and encourage all those scattered along the covenant path, no matter where they are in relation to where we are or wish they were. We joyfully welcome those returning and keep loving those who never do.

Love is Not a Tool

Love is not a means to an end. It is not a tool to manipulate a desired outcome from its target. It is an end in itself, perhaps the end. It undergirds God’s work and glory. It permeates Christ’s atoning sacrifice. His mission and His glorious redemptive work is infused and encompassed by it. His grace is extended by, through, and because of it.

It is at the heart of the Plan of Salvation and the reason for our creation. It is the great motivating force for all that is “virtuous, lovely, or of good report.”

Where Love Blooms

If you remove love from the world, we are left in a cold, barren, dark and lonely place. But a world (or a ward or family) where love reigns, life comes alive.

It opens and blooms, endowed with purpose and meaning, where weaknesses and mistakes are accepted as part of life and part of the learning and growing process, where differences are embraced, where enough room is given to falter, and encouragement is extended to try again, where intentions are honored even when execution falls short.

Love certainly doesn’t remove life’s challenges or prevent imperfect fails in its expression, but it does make them a whole lot easier to endure. Love is the glow of kindness, the warmth of acceptance and the encouraging nudge toward next steps.

Fine-tuning Love

There is not a single style of love, but there is one necessary expression of it. Remember that Jesus asked Peter three times whether he loved Him. Each time Christ answered Peter’s protestations of love with the injunction to “Go feed my sheep.”

Love, it turns out, is not merely a feeling of the heart. If love stays expressionless, bottled inside, we cripple it and undermine its potential impact on our own and others’ lives. Love was never meant to be hoarded or tucked away in the corner of our lives. Love that’s kept locked in the heart is a neutered, muted, impotent and empty kind of love, a shell of what it could be. Feeding His sheep is at the foundation of its true expression.

For love to reach the impressive heights of its full potential, it must be loosed from the prison of the heart and directed into our feet and hands and mouths. Feelings of love have to translate into words and actions and expressions of love. Love is not so small that it can be reduced to a mere emotion. It is a character trait as well. It’s not simply what we feel. It is fine-tuned in the act of service, nurtured in thoughtful expressions, deepened in warm embraces and sanctified in selfless prayers.

Love His Sheep

So reach out to those around you. Feed His sheep. The visitor. The old timer. The child. The returning member. Everyone!

Accept them. Resist the very human temptation to judge others. See them. Deeply. Charitably. Look beyond the exterior and see them as their Heavenly Father sees them, as His dear beloved children. Nothing more and nothing less.

Then say hello. Get to know them. Love and embrace them in all their glorious imperfection. Invite them. Pray for them. Smile at them. Befriend them. And then watch what happens to our already-loving ward family as love increasingly becomes an even more natural expression of who we are, disciples of Christ in search of His sheep to feed. 

Your Turn!

What does love mean to you? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo by Pixaby