Why all this talk about attitude? Does attitude really make a difference? Will attitude really make or break you? Perhaps these are similar to the questions you are asking. Or maybe you wonder if there are ways to monitor or cope when our attitudes are in transition from a negative to positive focus. You might also be wondering how to better develop and grow attitudes that will help you move forward in life and be successful. If this is you, you are in the right place.

3 Areas of Focus in the Attitude Category

There are three subtopics that I want to address through the articles in the attitude category of this blog: importance, coping skills, and growth.

Importance

I want to highlight the importance of different aspects surrounding our attitudes: the environment that we’re in, the outlook that we have. If we’re feeling stuck or we are holding back for some reason, it’s important to know why. It’s also important to know what might help us stay more positive.

Coping Skills

When we are in a place of transition do we have the right coping skills to help us stay positive and focused?

Growth

This is along the lines of how we can develop our attitudes and what influences them. Let’s learn about our attitudes so that we can leave them in the past, adjust them, or allow them to come with us.

While these are the 3 areas of focus, a single post might hit on any or all of them. You can expect posts on attitude on the 3^rd Thursday of the month.

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Suggested Articles in the Attitude Category

Read previous posts in the attitude category:

Why is personal growth important?

Develop a grateful mind

How to handle fear (the courage habit way)

Journal prompts for the end of the year

Is there a secret to confidence?

3 Reasons to change your bad habit

When learning about behavior we often think about things such as learning why we do things the way we do or how we can take what we learn about behavior and apply behavior change strategies. However, there is another aspect that sometimes gets left out. Faith. Does faith have a place in personal development? Can it help us know good help from bad help?

Make connections with your faith

What I have done to keep faith a part of my learning about behavior is to look for connections.

When I find practices and studies on behavior that are grounded in science, I look to see that the practices and results hold up against my own life experiences or the experiences of those around me. Yet, these are not the only connections that I seek. I make connections between what I learn in the science to what I learn in my faith.

Good Help or Bad Help?

There are a lot of resources out there for people that want to change their behavior. If you start the journey to improve yourself you will find that there are many people out there with reasons and practices to improve yourself. How do you know good help from bad help?

Being intentional about what we believe was the topic of last week’s article. It discussed how different people or groups can influence our thinking and behaviors, often without our even realizing it. In today’s article I suggest that we also need to be intentional about incorporating our faith into our personal development plan.

Faith is the lens

Faith is one of those important things to remember when we learn about behavior and start to apply it to our lives.

Faith is important because it provides you with a lens for looking at the theories for understanding behavior and applying what you learn. Without that lens you might follow theories or practices that might be harmful rather than helpful. Or, even if it’s not harmful, it still might not provide you with the full or complete picture of the behavior or practices that you are trying to change or improve.

Have you been looking for connections with your faith as you navigate the personal development world? Are there self-help or personal development practices that you question since they don’t line up with your faith?
(Share them in the comments section of this post. Perhaps I can write a future post addressing these things.)

Behavior Challenge: Reflect on how you currently incorporate your faith into your self-help and personal development strategies and goals. Are you happy where you are or do you want to grow in that area?

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Read more on the connections that I am making with faith and behavior and personal development.
• Read Where do beliefs come from?

Sometimes we act out of beliefs that are passed down to us from the media, society, or others that we know. These beliefs aren’t always intentionally accepted, but they can become a part of how we look at the world. When we don’t realize that our behavior is affected by what we think, a view like that is easy to miss. However, when the connection between beliefs and behaviors becomes clear we start to realize the importance of being intentional about our views. This means reflecting on the questions of where do beliefs come from and how can we form intentional, or better, beliefs?

Where do beliefs come from?

When I write about beliefs in this article I am talking about how we see the world and ourselves from different domains of life. For example, there are beliefs that we hold about our health and fitness. There are beliefs that we hold on finances. There are beliefs we hold about singleness and marriage. There are many categories I could name. In each one of them, the view we hold often times come of a variety of sources.

In my journey of personal growth it has become apparent that knowing where your beliefs come from is important. There are probably things in our lives that we believe, but perhaps we haven’t taken an intentional look at why we believe them.

A look at fitness beliefs

Let’s take a look at the domain of fitness. We all probably have thoughts about fitness that don’t really come from ourselves. One of these shows a limited view of how we think we should be active and exercise. As if there are one or two right ways and the rest are inadequate and therefore not of value.   

Think about it this way. Many people have this default idea that working out means that you go to the gym. If you aren’t a gym person you probably don’t work out. Yet, you can work out in other ways. You can swim, or run, or join a dance class. You can do a lunch time walk or sprint up the stairs once every day. These things are also working out.

I bet you can come up with other ways to work out that fit you and your current situation. We can get to these ideas when we realize that we’ve been thinking about our workout from the wrong perspective. Perhaps it was someone else’s perspective that we adopted and it’s time to get in touch with what working out means for us.

3 Tips to Intentional Beliefs

An intentional look at what we believe is important as we go through life and aim to grow. To continue to do things in the same way as everyone else without reflecting doesn’t always lead to the best results.

Here are 3 tips towards intentional beliefs:

1. Ask – Ask yourself how you came to this belief.  
2. Acknowledge – Acknowledge where your view originated. Is it from you, a parent, a friend, society, social media?
3. Answer  or Affirm– Answer that belief with a different one if it needs to change or affirm it if it’s a belief you have chosen.

Can you think of one area in your life where you have let outside influences determine your thoughts or beliefs about something?

Behavior Challenge:  Reflect on areas where you might be struggling to grow and see if there are any beliefs that might be holding you back. Then try to answer that belief with a different belief.

For more reading:

3 Tips to Jump Start Your Personal Reflection Habit

Do You Enjoy Silence and Reflection?

Faith and behavior topics are often avoided because they are viewed as separate subjects or somehow taboo. However, work on yourself is more complete when you work on both your mind and your heart. There are scientific practices that connect. I see this in my learning and practice of Eastern Orthodoxy and personal growth.

My goal for writing about Eastern Orthodoxy and Personal Growth

You could choose to navigate this blog and not read the articles on faith and behavior. However, I submit that if you skip these articles you will miss part of the story.

As I share more articles on the subject, I hope it will become clear why I have decided to include this focus on faith in my blog on personal development.

For now, let me sum it up. It’s about faith and behavior.

In my process of learning scientific practices that improve behavior, I often connect what I am hearing or reading to teachings of the Eastern Orthodox spiritual life. My goal, in this section of my website, is to share the connections I see in scientific practices to practices in the Eastern Orthodox spiritual life. To do this I have committed to writing monthly articles where I will share my learnings.

I emphasize learnings. I am not expert in either scientific or Orthodox practices. I am an Eastern Orthodox Christian and I am learning.  

I invite you to learn with me.

Why write about Eastern Orthodoxy and Personal Growth?

Is not it enough to write about the Christian Church and personal growth?

Why is this discussion needed at all?

Personal development is better accomplished when all areas of one’s life are addressed. To exclude the spiritual part of your life when you are growing in other areas leads to an imbalance.

I also find the depth of the teachings of the Eastern Orthodox Church assist me in understanding the larger issues of personal development. 

In future posts I want to discuss the scientific and faith connections in greater detail. Sometimes I will specifically refer to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Other times I will write about a broader faith in God.

For now, I want to share what I mean by heart and the importance of training your heart.

The meaning of train your heart

In my post on building confidence through science and faith I shared how it’s important to grow your faith and that we can affect our confidence by working on our inner being. I also shared that I train my heart through prayer and building community.

What do I mean when I say that I train my heart and how does this affect my behavior?

The following is an attempt at an introductory and foundational answer to this question. I will break the question into two parts. I will share my current understandings on this subject and I aim to share what I know to the best of my ability.

The heart is the center of our being

What does it mean to train your heart?

At the center of this question is a need to understand the Eastern Orthodox view of the human person.

When I speak about the heart, I am not talking of the heart as a muscle but as the center of our being.

I am currently working my way through the book Confronting and Controlling Thoughts by Anthony M. Coniaris and it helped me formulate what I will share in this section.

The heart can be compared to the unconscious.

The unconscious is: 1) the past 2) the passions that we inherited

Therefore, in our unconscious we have both memories and things we desire, the passions.

Fr. Stephen Freeman’s blog Glory to God for All Things has an introduction to the Orthodox understanding of the passions if you want to learn more.

How does this affect my behavior?

There can be good and bad in this unconscious heart.

The good: our conscience, knowledge of God, and a sense of right and wrong.

The bad: evil thoughts, evil actions.

Therefore, in the heart we can have self-awareness and an idea of God. However, we can also have distraction and evil.

Knowing this provides us with insight into how our heart functions in the human person and provides us with a greater understanding of where our behaviors fit into the picture. This is important when we are thinking about behavior and behavior change. It shows us how important it is to take our faith into consideration when we are making big behavior changes.

Want to dig deeper into this subject? If you’re interested in learning with me, look out for the monthly posts on faith and behavior.

Join the mailing list so you don’t miss a post on faith and behavior!

Read more posts on faith and behavior:

Faith and Behavior: Why do we keep faith and behavior quiet?

Confidence Through Science and Faith | Train your heart and mind