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

There are how to articles on building confidence that list things to do to build up your confidence. That’s the scientific way. How does faith help us build our confidence? Can we build our confidence in a scientific manner while also considering the place of faith in building confidence? Let’s consider how to grow confidence through science and faith.

Lessons on Growing Confidence

In last week’s article I shared where I am in building my confidence through two very important insights. If you missed last week’s article you can read it now: Is There a Secret to Confidence? | Growing Confidence

In this week’s article I want to highlight a few practices from science and faith that can assist in building confidence.  In my experience, the faith practices that assist in developing confidence are those that help me persevere. The scientific practices I am just beginning to learn. I want to share what I am learning

Confidence: The Science

Let’s start with the science. You can get that list of ways to boost confidence if you just want some quick tips. Y’all know me though. I want the podcast that goes into detail on how to act on those scientific tips. I listened to a podcast the other day that interviewed a high performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais. The topic was performing under pressure and performing with confidence.

Dr. Michael Gervais works with top performing athletes, musicians, Olympians, and others that are faced with maintaining their confidence under pressure. This brings an interesting focus to building confidence. Dr. Gervais speaks of training our confidence, in a similar manner to how we train for a sport or activity that we love.

Train Your Mind

The emphasis is on training your confidence in low pressure, calm environments. You then work your way up to what Dr. Gervais calls progressively more aggressive environments. You might think that the process to actually doing this would be complicated. It’s not. It’s actually something I’ve been sharing with readers on this blog from the beginning. You need to rid yourself of your negative thoughts…they are holding you back .

According to Dr. Gervais, it’s not preparation or past success that affects your confidence. It’s those things that you tell yourself. If you don’t train and practice your confidence in the calm places, you might freeze under pressure when it really matters.

Take Steps

For several weeks now I have been considering how much I hold back when there are important things to say. I started to wonder if I could help myself by starting to say more of what I think even when it’s a small comment. I realized that I wasn’t practicing speaking out with the little things, so of course I lacked the confidence to speak out when it really mattered.

That’s what Dr. Gervais is talking about. For us to gain our confidence and keep it when things are more intense, we need to be working at it all the time. He suggests writing out the bad thoughts and replacing them with good thoughts. Those negative and limiting thoughts are important to address and replace. However, this article is looking at confidence through science and faith. What about faith practices?

Confidence: The Faith

How do faith practices fit into this athletic training image of how to work hard at building our confidence?

At first glance you might not see it. Let’s look back at my article that I wrote last week: Is There a Secret to Confidence? I share how taking action and perseverance are ways that help me grow more confident. This relates to the struggle of the athlete on the field and not shrinking back when the spotlight is on you or you find yourself in a difficult situation. In those places you have to take action and you have to persevere. Faith is the same way.

You start small and take small steps to practice your faith. But you have to build it up. If you stay at that first step, that starting level, you will not deepen your faith. If you give up when it gets difficult you will not deepen your faith.

Confidence in life comes from training our minds as well as training our hearts.

Train Your Heart

When I am working to train my heart I do it through prayer and building a community.

Prayer and building a community around you of those that share your faith are important for confidence building. I know that this is a different angle than you hear at church, but don’t worry. I understand that in terms of growing your faith prayer brings us closer to God and a community helps us grow closer to God also.

Yet look at it from the angle of how prayer and community building affects your inner being, which therefore affects your confidence.

Open your heart

If I am closed off to prayer or to the community around me, I might be so caught up in myself that I miss the message that I am to give to the world. If I open my heart, however, I can see the needs around me. I can see how my gifts can serve the world and I can act confidently.

Confidence through Science and Faith

From looking both at science and faith we can see that they work together to build confidence by building and training both the mind and the heart.

Where is your current focus, mind or heart, in terms of how you are working to increase your confidence?

Behavior Challenge: Take some time this week to decide how you can better train your heart and mind to improve your confidence.

This is just the beginning of my posts on science and faith. I’m excited to share that I will post about science and faith once a month. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to my email list.

Listen to the Podcast: Your Ultimate Guide to Performing Under Pressure and Unleashing Confidence – Dr. Michael Gervais is BACK – Science of Success Podcast.

Talk about our behavior change goals is almost as non-existent as talk about our religious practices. Do we feel that we have to hide our behavior change goals? Do we feel that we have to hide our faith practices? For some people, faith and behavior might seem separate topics. Talk that connects the science of behavior change to our religious practices is limited. Why do we keep faith and behavior quiet?

Our religion is very close to us so it’s sometimes difficult to share it with others, because we are certain that others wouldn’t understand. It’s easier to stay quiet.

We tend to view our behavior in this same manner. Therefore, very few people know what we are working to change in ourselves and we want to keep it that way.

Sharing is risky

Why do we not share what we are working on in ourselves? Could it be that we are worried that, similar to telling others of our religious beliefs, we might be viewed as weak? Or that we might be misunderstood?

3 thoughts that prevent us from sharing our behavior change journey with others:

1) People will judge me based on what I am currently working to change. We are afraid that people will say or think things like, “You’re still working on that?” or “How can someone like you struggle with something like that?” Admitting that we’re not perfect can leave us feeling vulnerable.

2) If people find out that I’m working on _____ they will expect me to act like I’ve already changed that area. We fear being held accountable for a skill that we haven’t yet mastered. We don’t want people to throw our change goals in our face. “I thought you said were working on _____”.

3) If I admit that I am working on _____ maybe my boss will think I’m not a good a candidate for the promotion. Similar to fearing judgement, we can fear being viewed as incapable due to sharing what we want to improve.

There might be other reasons that we hold back what we are working on from other people. There also might be things that keep us from sharing how our faith impacts our behavior.

Faith and behavior

In an effort to open the dialogue of faith and behavior, I want to share my experience with living out my faith practices and how it affects my behavior change goals.

However, this is such a huge topic that I won’t be able to do it justice in one article. Consider this the first of articles and other possible media where I begin to discuss how my Christian faith fits into the process of behavior change.

To begin, I offer you a brief summary of how I currently see this process working in my life.

As I seek out and apply science based behavior change practices, my faith guides me to those practices that align with my faith. I am learning that my Christian faith often prepares me for some of the science based strategies. This isn’t too much of a surprise if you really think about it.

It’s my first summary statement so it will probably grow with me. Do you have a summary statement?

You can share here

I want this blog to be a safe space for people to share their behavior change goals. I also want to provide a safe space to learn how to talk about faith and behavior.

Did I miss any reasons why we don’t share our behavior change goals with the people around us?

If you think of a reason not listed, share your reason in the comments.

Behavior Challenge: Write your own summary of how you currently view the interaction of faith and behavior in your life.

Read more of my articles:

Why is Personal Growth Important?

Why is Behavior Change Important for Personal Growth?

Embracing the small changes