By I was talking with a young man heading into ministry, and he was asking about how I run my life. “What are the good habits for a lifetime of ministry? How should I be starting out as a pastor?”
I said that when I was an undergraduate I’d started a habit of reading the whole Bible every year, New Testament and Psalms twice. Plans like that are easily available all over the place, of course.
But the next sentence I said slowly shocked me – and rather dazed him. I said that in that case I’ve intentionally and slowly read the whole Old Testament at least fifty times, New Testament and Psalms, a hundred. And that’s not taking into account reading for prep or other studying.
Whatever passage of the Bible I’m preaching on, I can guarantee I’ve read it before, many, many times.
And it all comes down to the power of a habit. And a lot pf pencils.
Let me take the long way round to that.
I’ve been playing around with the ideas of Goals or Projects for a long time, but if I stand back and ask what I’ve learnt, three things stand out rather quickly.
Moving from perfection to percentage
This is the biggest shift – or at least the biggest clarification. The idea of Goals contains two very different concepts, and they need to be tackled with different mindsets.
A project or goal is a specific, definable task. There may well be steps to take along the way, and those might be separate, or sequenced.
In the next two weeks you’re going to France on holiday, so you need to clean and pack the car, find the passports and order the ferry tickets. You can order the ferry ticket at any point, but there’s no point cleaning the car too far from the trip or you’ll need to do it again. And there’s no point packing the car until you’re close to the leaving day, and certainly no point in packing it before you clean it.
The passports will bug you until you know you’ve got them, so do it now.
Obvious – sequenced, separate little subtasks. Sub-projects if you will.
And they all have a yes/no answer to the question ‘Did I do that job?’
But – the bigger project, of getting ready to go on holiday, isn’t quite a yes/no, in a useful sense, up to the point you drive away. Until then, what you’re better off with is a ‘how far did I get?’ question.
And that’s quite illuminating, and encouraging.
You see, when you planned your week, you might have decided that one of your projects was to read a particular book. You’re designing a sermon series a few months ahead, and want to get your head in the game. Good plan.
But, life and ministry and reality get in the way. A pastoral meetings opens up a nasty can of worms. A phone call means you have to drop everything and do a visit some way away.
And that book is actually quite hard to focus on.
So when you review your week, the question you ask yourself is critically important.
‘Did I read the book I planned to read?’ No. Then you’ve failed. Sit on the spiritual naughty step.
But ask, ‘How far did I get reading the book?’ 80%. Well, 80% beats 0% so that’s a win. You got 80% of the way.
I think we beat ourselves up when we ask the success/failure question, when we’d be better off mentally asking the ‘How far did I get’ question.
I call that ‘Moving from perfection to percentage’. And I’ve found it enormously liberating.
Moving from finishing tasks to counting habits
I’m increasingly noticing that a number of things I want to do are only achieved by steadily having a good habit of counting habits.
Let’s say you want to work on your fitness. Now you could set a goal (or guess a goal) of the weight you want to lift by the end of the year. That’s maybe a good idea, although you want to make sure you’re not delusional.
But how do you achieve that? By a habit.
A healthy pattern is probably exercising sensibly 3 to 4 times a week. So take the lower number, 3, and multiply it by the number of weeks. 156. Subtract for Christmas, Easter and a couple of colds, and you’ve probably got a sensible goal of 125 visits to the gym.
But you’re heading for a target you can’t quite reach yet, so you want one more subtle shift – 125 incremental visits to the gym in a year.
Now, forget the sweaty picture and concentrate on the lesson.
It’s all about the habit, over the longer period. Have a bad week? Pick it up next week. Slowly, step by step, challenge yourself.
Again, it’s not a pass/fail model.
How many times did I write/run/read/memorise/practice my Hebrew last week? So how many times shall I do it next week, to hit the goal?
Those are things which compound, slowly, over time.
So therefore, I’m noticing, the habit counting itself becomes the goal. Because often it’s quite hard to define the goal in any other meaningful sense. ‘Read more’. ‘Sleep more.’ ‘Be more hospitable?’ How do you do that? How do you know you’ve done it? Or when you’re setting things up, how do you know if it’s realistic to be Grade 4 on the clarinet by Christmas?
But there are things you can count: I’ll go to bed by ten four nights every week. We’ll have three people round for lunch each month. I’ll practice for 5 minutes every day.
Duolingo knows it. It’s all about keeping the streak going, on an incline. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, and James Clear’s Atomic Habits laid it all out.
In other words, what I’m noticing is that if I set up a goal or project, and then ask ‘how am I going to achieve that?’, not only must it break up into separate elements, but many of those elements will only be achieved by the work of a habit.
The habit becomes a challenge
Confession time – I’ve often had a problem with words like ‘Goals’ or ‘Projects’. They convey the language of spreadsheets and pie-charts, of meetings in bland offices, where everyone looks identically professional.
I don’t warm to the idea of an exciting pie-chart. That’s not how I’m wired.
But as I’ve used the language of habits a bit more, and prepped and counted them, the word that increasingly feels more resonant for me is ‘a challenge’.
I’m going to challenge myself to X, or Y, or Z. Push myself a bit. Feel awkward doing something interesting and new.
How will I do that? Well, people who do that have a habit of…. And so we go.
If something is a challenge it has an inherent motivation, that doesn’t have to be bolted on or dreamt up. iI automatically gives it the element of being a game. A bit of fun. You can feel the element of challenge in the tingle in your finger tips.
Or I can.
Now, my language will not be yours, you’ve learnt other lessons, and you’re a whole other person.
What have you been learning? Pile in.
