ToDay with E.G: What is the Next Step? Part 11

This week is supposed to be the last week of our leadership posts. I have tried to keep you company during this November month of change. Changing habits are not easy and they are not impossible. It just take endurance on the part of the person learning that particular habit. Someone who want to change the world must also be able to learn to change and reinvent himself.

This do happen when people are tenacious. Tenacious means that you won't give up and you aren't interested to abandon a project midway. Tenacity is a building block of new habit forming. Ron McIntosh tells the story on how people came to the theoretical realization through psycho-cybernetic that habits can be learned and formed in a season width of 3 weeks. Some of you have been trying to integrate new habits to your character since the beginning of this month. As it is easily noticeable through experience or observation, destroying a habit and a character is easy. However building a habit take time and effort. These effort happens through the re-organization of priorities and personal time allocated to different events in our lives. Doing that for three weeks - 21 days - should do the trick.

The difficult part is always in the beginning. Starting something is never easy. But once it has started working the rest is fairly easy to maintain if we are good managers. And the management of those habits follow what i already wrote about in 'First Thing First'. It is easy not to compromise if your priority if it is linked in a certain way to your mission statement of life, to your values and conviction. That is why I insisted first that a) pro-activity and b) starting with the end in mind, should precede the management of what you have build, so that what you have build is based on those core values. Ravi Zacharias said that the difference between opinions and convictions, is that you can change your opinions without changing who you are. But if you change your conviction you can not do that without changing who you are. Hence with regards to your priorities learn to know where to compromise and where not. This is why effective preaching and evangelism is tough. It's because it does try to go beyond opinions and tries to touch people convictions - hence the understandable resistance.

I have a friend South Africa who has lost weight and became almost as slim as me .. just joking but it is pretty much close to that. He never reverted back to his over-weighted mass. It's been years now. Close to 4 years. I asked him how he did it and more importantly how he kept it. The how he did it was the usual answer people give. A mixture of healthy diet and regular sport. How he kept it was another story. He told me that only the beginning was difficult. The part of shrinking his body mass to the desirable outcome was most difficult part - it is like this 3 weeks habit forming season. But keeping it wasn't that hard. All he had to do is be clear on his main priorities and have embrace a different paradigm, worldview - way of seeing life - than the one he had and try to never loose that from his perspective.

Philip McGraw (aka Dr. Phil) has repetitively helped the overweight loose weight and as i regularly followed his popular psychological T.V Show, he made once the comment about loosing weight. He said it is not about the diet nor the sport exercises. It is about a change of a life style. You have to change your lifestyle if you want to keep the change you have recently welcomed in your life. You change your eating habit and what you shop and what your fridge shall from now on contain. That's with the weight resolution. With the habits, you start hanging around people who will help you grow in those habits you have newly incorporated in your character. You revise the content of things you'll start listening more. It is a complete mental make-over.

When i started changing in the direction I asked God to sustain me in, i started listening people with whom i shared the basic knowledge and listened to them often since i was still so low in that ladder of experience. Thank God i was already climbing the ladder of those habits but i was at the lowest past of ladder. Hence i learned from those mentors. I listened regularly to the popular Christian radio broadcast Focus on the Family with Dr. James Dobson (for 2 years), the popular American psychological TV show Dr. Phil (for a whole year), and so on. I did them consistently without missing one broadcast with few exceptions. I did the same with my selection of sermons and the materials that i bought (DvDs, Radio Tapes, CDs and Books). It always coincided with my need of  the time. Even the movies and series I watched had that consistent tone i was looking for. I was goal oriented on these respects. The interesting part of that ... it is always the people around you that notice the change the first. The change in behavior. The change in your thinking pattern. The change in your preaching style and content. The change in your linguistic expression and your fine use of words. So as you end this week with new habits that you practiced over the past 21 days, the next step is creating an ambiance and atmosphere consistent with what you need to strongly root those habits.

• He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster. (Proverbs 18:9 - KJV)

• Celui qui se relâche dans son travail Est frère de celui qui détruit. (Proverbe 18:9 Darby - French)

May the Lord bless you all in Jesus' name.