Successful behavior change requires thinking and doing

How often have we heard, or ourselves said, "Well, that's just the way I am?" The older we get the more inclined we are to say or feel this, and not just to rationalize bad behaviors. That is because in a certain sense "that's just the way I am" is true.

The important question is how do we come to be what we are? Was it inevitable? Are we really born that way? Is it predestined? Can we change or be changed from "what we are?"

I once heard a thoughtful person say, "what you are at any given point in your life is the sum total of your thoughts to that point." My reaction was negative. Some are richer than others. Some have greater opportunities for education. Some have better health. Some have higher IQ's. So there are certain differences in our material and physical circumstances, but even people relatively similarly situated have very different behaviors. What we really are, then, stems from our choices as to how we react to and what patterns of thought we develop in connection with whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.

Aristotle taught that "moral excellence" comes from practicing virtuous habits. "Not one of the moral virtues comes to be in us merely by nature. The virtues come to be in us neither by nature, nor despite nature, but we are furnished by nature with a capacity for receiving them and are perfected in them through (habit)." Aristotle also notes that our habitual reaction to circumstances begins early in our youth and, as such, has an increasing influence on each of our subsequent choices to the point that these embedded choices seem to be natural. "Again, it grows up with us all from infancy, so it is a hard matter to remove from ourselves this feeling, ingrained as it is into our very life." — Aristotle.

An important step in the change process, then, is the awareness that our possession or lack of "moral virtues" is habitual. Aristotle points out that courage or "self-mastery" (and I would add anger among many others) are consequences of habitual responses. One writer uses the image of going down a hill on a sled. The first time it is easy to create a track in the soft snow. "But should we choose the same path a second or third time, tracks will start to develop, and soon we will tend to get stuck in a rut—our route will now be quite rigid, as neural circuits, once established, tend to become self-sustaining." — Norman Doidge, "The Brain that Changes Itself."