Everyone wants to see change in their lives.

**It’s only when the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of going through the things necessary to change that we will do what we need to do to change.

**If we keep on doing what we have always been doing we will keep on being where we have always been being.


Six Categories Where Change May Be Needed:

1. Healthy Living Habits — These types of habits center around your lifestyle and health. Your exercise routine, sleep patterns, eating habits, and hygiene habits, etc. are all examples of behaviors that would fall into this category. 

2. Financial Habits — These types of habits center around how you spend and save your money. Budgeting, spending habits, and saving habits all fall into this category.

3. Productivity Habits — These types of habits center around how you work and manage your time and energy. Your productivity habits determine the level of output you’re able to achieve on a daily basis.

4. Mindset Habits — A habit doesn’t need to be a physical behavior that you act out. Your thoughts are habits as well. Are you constantly thinking about the past? That’s a habit. Are you repeatedly latching onto negative thoughts that impact your self-image? That’s a habit as well. Mindset habits are crucial because they impact almost every other area of your life.

5. Connection Habits — These types of habits revolve around your ability to form relationships with other people. Connection habits essentially determine how deep your personal relationships are and how engaging your social life is. Reaching out to friends, making plans, and approaching strangers are examples of connection habits.

6. Spiritual Habits - These habits are integrated with our whole life and spiritual habits impact all the other categories I have just listed. They are about how you see yourself and God and your life meaning and others. They include practices like gathering with others to worship and learn, prayer, bible reading, meditation, serving others, showing mercy and so on.

"When we have bad habits we serve them, but when we have good habits they serve us." John C Maxwell


Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. 2 Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. 3 If anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves. 4 Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else, 5 for each one should carry their own load.
Galatians 6:1-5

The word burdens is like a piano.
The word load is like a backpack.

James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, teaches that, "Goals don’t determine success. Systems determine success."

If we want to succeed at changing our habits, we should focus on changing the systems that produce results, and not just on the goals.

The Galatians 6 passage teaches us a new system for change. It’s called “getting help from others”.

There are key elements you need to have in play when getting help from others:

*Humility
*Necessity
*Transparency
*Consistency
*Proximity

Need some extra horsepower to get unstuck? Are you up for asking for a partner to help you get past the spinning wheel of the frustrating lack of progress?

Prayer for Serenity

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;
taking, as Jesus did,
this sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it;
trusting that You will make all things right
if I surrender to Your will;
so that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Amen.

                                            Reinhold Niebuhr