How to Break Bad Habits for Good (With God’s Help - Step-by-Step Guide)

What's going on, everybody? I'm just taking a few seconds to, uh, get these streams going on other platforms, and then I got something awesome today. I'm going to be talking about how we can— how God can help us overcome our weaknesses and our behaviors and our habits. So I'm super excited to talk about that. Just give me a second, I gotta share this with my Facebook group. If you guys haven't heard about my Facebook group, Self-Reliance with Christ, you definitely should check it out. Um, it— yeah, I just share stuff like this every day. Self-mastery, right? We're trying to be better and rely on Jesus Christ to help us be better. So one second. All right, everybody, I got something I'm super excited to share with everyone today. Really passionate about this kind of stuff because I feel like this is what matters, is being the best version of yourself and trying to improve each day. So let me make sure we are good to go. All right, got my screen ready to rock. Hopefully some people will pop in, and if not, maybe you watch it later. Okay. All right everyone, today I want to talk about how God can help us overcome our bad habits and behaviors because We have weaknesses in this life. Everybody has weaknesses, and we can overcome them through God's help. God gives us weaknesses so we can be humble and we can strive to be better, right? Like, if we're all perfect, we wouldn't have anything to rely on God for, right? But we're here on this earth in order to be our best selves, self-mastery, to control ourselves, to then give ourselves. Um, there's, there's a lot that we can do, and, and God wants us to rely on him, like I said, through prayer, through taking action every day, and improving little by little. One of my favorite scriptures is in Isaiah. It says, uh, whom shall he teach doctrine and whom shall he make understand? Let me say it again. Whom shall he teach doctrine and whom shall he make to understand? Um, oh my gosh, I said it wrong again. Okay, let me say— I gotta memorize, but I guess I'm, I'm freezing up in front of you guys. This is live, by the All right. So to whom shall he teach doctrine? Whom shall he make to understand wisdom? Them who are weaned from the breast and drawn from the milk. For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little and there a little. And that's how we learn in this life is little by little. So if you're not there yet, if you don't feel like you still have bad behaviors, if you have bad things like bad habits and actions and things that you do, that's okay. We're here to improve. And that's why Jesus Christ is there for us, so we can repent and improve each day. And today I'm going to show you some tools that can help you overcome these bad habits through taking action every day and relying on the Lord to help you overcome these things. And it's good. It's okay to have weaknesses. Again, everybody does. And if you rely on God, he's going to help you overcome those through those trials. Like, if you're not patient, right, that's okay. He can help you become more patient if you rely on him and you acknowledge why you're not patient, the things that are making you lose your patience and how you react. So again, I'm super excited to bring this to you guys. I'm going to teach it in a couple different ways so you guys understand. Maybe one way will hit you guys harder than the other. But again, the purpose of this today is just to show you guys, if you rely on Jesus Christ, rely on God, he can help you break your bad habits and your bad behaviors through taking action every day, through doing these simple things. And these— I'm going to provide you guys the tools that you can use to overcome these bad habits. And kind of point you in the right direction on what I've been doing and what I think will help you. So without further ado, let's dive right in. So let me share my screen. All right. So first thing I'm going to read to you is I teach a self-reliance class for my church, and I don't teach it necessarily. I facilitate it. I guide people through this. And this is something that we were going through yesterday. So I want to share with everyone. It says your body experiences strong emotions Becoming emotionally resilient requires you to acknowledge, accept, and respond to your emotions in a healthy way. Emotions are a normal part of our mortal experience. Sometimes— and mortal experience means like this life. We're here on this life, and we believe that after you die, you continue. You're an eternal being, right? Your soul never dies, like your spirit. You go on forever. Anyway, so while we're here on this mortal experience, we're going to face emotions, right? And we're sometimes not going to know how to control them. But I'm going to show you guys right now, some tools to do it. Sometimes your emotions may be strong, and it can be challenging to respond to them. When you follow your emotions to— sorry, when you follow your emotions to decide your behaviors— man, it's early in the morning, I guess. I'm blowing it. All right. When you allow your emotions to decide your behaviors, you surrender to your emotions rather than using your agency to respond to your emotions. Okay, and agency is the freedom to choose. Okay, so again, when you, when you surrender your emotions to your behaviors, right, when you allow your emotions to dictate your behaviors, you're, you're giving your emotions the ability to control you rather than your ability to choose and make those decisions. Okay, then in the class we, we discuss how can striving to manage our emotions help us become more like Christ. We don't have to discuss that, right? But I'm going to read this other part that I really like. The first step in managing emotions is becoming aware of them. Now, that is like the number one issue that I have had as I've tried to be better in my life, is I just wasn't aware of what I was doing. And that's a blessing of being married, is my wife is able to help me be aware of things that I was doing that maybe I didn't think was— didn't even know I was doing. Okay, so being self-aware is, is the key to all this, right? If you don't know what you're doing, if you just get angry and you react all the time, you don't know why, but you just keep— you're you're not going to really be able to change, right? So self-awareness is the key to changing. All right, one tool that can help is an emotional journal, right? An emotions journal. All right, and the planner that I came out with actually has a section I do every day that I go through my emotions. I go through like self-reflection and daily repentance. But I'll show you whether you get the planner, I'll show you where to get it. It's free on Kindle Unlimited. And if you get it, it's meant to be written in. I write in every day, but it doesn't matter like whether you get the one that I have or you just write this down on a piece of paper. But this is something I'd recommend to do. Daily. It says get an emotions journal where you reflect on your emotions you have felt. In an emotions journal, you record the emotions you feel, the situations you were in, and the actions you took because of the emotions. Ponder these feelings and situations and then write them down, write down your thoughts. As you track your emotions, look for patterns and trends. Consider writing in your emotions journal. See the example. Consider writing in your emotions journal daily. Okay, daily. This is not just one thing you do once. It's a daily action that can help you break these bad habits and your behaviors, the bad behaviors, especially as you rely on God, because he wants you to be like him, right? He made that invitation to us. The difficult invitation that we try to keep is what manner of men ought you to be, even as I am. So he wants you to be better, right? And that's what the beautiful thing about this life and repentance is, right? So Here's some of the examples below. So, some emotions that you might feel, right? And again, you guys can keep track of it like this if you like this format. I'm going to show you a couple different ways. I'm going to show you the one that I do every day, but I'll go through this. Example: Today I felt angry and hurt. The situation is I got in a big argument with my dad. The action taken because of emotion: I got really upset and yelled at him and lashed out at my friends. I felt bad about it. And then pondering and reflecting on what you could have done better. I should talk to my dad about how I feel instead of getting angry at him. Okay. So if you do those things, like if you ponder, if you do what you pondered, right, talking to your dad about how you feel and why you instead of getting angry, you can change that action you took next time, right? So if you got today, I felt angry and hurt, right? That was the emotion. I got in a big argument with my dad. First of all, like don't get in an argument, but if you do, Talk about how you feel instead of getting angry, right? I know that can be difficult. That's an example of the emotions journal, right? Another one. Today I felt joy and love. Okay, what was the situation? I heard a heartfelt prayer that touched me. Okay, what was the action? You thank God. Thank Heavenly Father for his love. And I thought about how I pray. And then you ponder. You said, I want to feel this way again by trying to connect better to Heavenly Father through prayer. Okay, so again, you are— what you're doing in this situation is you're reflecting on the emotion, right? The situation that caused you to feel that, the actions that you took, and you're thinking about. Now, that's the emotions journal that they suggest in this self-reliance course that I'm going through. I have a different way of doing it every day. I'm going to show you guys really quick. So I created a book called The Self-Reliance Planner. It's what I use every day. I've been using for 7 years, and I finally decided to publish it. And I write in it every day, as you guys can see. This is helpful to me because I need something to write down. I need like a system and a process. So breaking it down, we're going to go to this page. And when I plan my day, actually, I'm going to go to a different view. When I plan my day, I have morning, my morning routine where I time block and I do specific things and set goals. But part of that morning routine is a daily repentance slash self-reflection. And I track my numbers for the day. But today we're going to be discussing the reality model. Now, I learned this from the book, uh, it's The Eighth Habit. It's by Franklin Covey, those guys that wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This is how they, um, they go through it. And I don't know why it's reversed for you guys. That's really weird. Um, but that's fine, I guess. That's weird. It looks like it's reversed. Maybe you guys can read it, but it's reversed for me. Anyway. So, let me start with this. This is how you can acknowledge what's going on in your life. And again, if you're not doing these things, it's gonna be really hard to change. Or if you don't understand this, it was really hard for me to make those changes until I understood how this works. So let me, let me write something for you guys. So you guys can kind of get where I'm coming from. All right, so There's, in life, I'm not going to write in cursive. All right. So in life, we face stimulus, right? There's things that happen. I'm going to want to write in cursive because I've just been practicing. It's just going to do it. Okay. So stimulus is something that happens to us, right? Something that, anything that can happen, like a dog barking or someone saying you're dumb, right? That's stimulus. Right? And there's a space between stimulus and how you respond, okay? It's called stimulus and response. Hope you guys can see that. Let's see. There's a space between stimulus and response, all right? We all face it. And in that space is— it's called the freedom to choose. Freedom to choose. Or another way to say it is Self-awareness. Self-awareness. Now, when you don't have the ability to stop and reflect or like be patient and take that time between stimulus, something happened like your wife, someone saying you're dumb, or someone like hitting you, and if you immediately react, usually you don't— you're going to react with the natural man, like the carnal man, that it's like the fallen man that just wants to like lash out and and like hit or react or not turn the other cheek. And that's what Jesus Christ taught on the Sermon on the Mount. He wants us to, you know, take the higher road, right? Someone gives— hits you on the cheek, turn the cheek. If someone asks you to go walk a mile, walk with them another mile, right? Walk with them too. Someone asks for something, give them your coat too. Like, he— the higher law, what Jesus taught, was just to be better, right? And it's very difficult to be better if you don't acknowledge in the space between stimulus and response if you don't acknowledge what's going on. All right, so this is how I used to be, and I'm sure this is what most people are, right? You have stimulus— that might be spelling stimulus wrong— stim-u-lus. It might be an I or U. Anyway, so if you don't have self-awareness, or, uh, everybody has freedom to choose, but if you're not aware of what's going on and you just respond immediately then usually I would say like, that's bad, right? Like, and I used to be like that really, really bad. I would just like, something happened, I would respond, right? I wouldn't really take time to think about it, and I would not reflect on how, like, what was going on to make me, you know, respond the way I did. I would just, that was just life. I was like, oh, this is the way I am, like, I'll try better. But I didn't understand the importance of this self-reflection right here, the self-awareness. So I want you guys to understand that things will happen to you in your life. And you can acknowledge what those things are in the space between the stimulus and the response. And it's self-awareness. It's freedom to choose how you react. Now, again, if you don't take time every day, or I would say every day, but don't take time to acknowledge what those things are that are stimulating you, that happen to you, and how you respond to them, it's gonna be hard to change. Okay? So this is what I do every day. It's, again, this model. I was taught this model. By studying this, and I believe it will help everybody, um, that wants to improve, right? And how can God help you with breaking these bad habits and these behaviors? Well, if you pray and you ask God for help, he's going to help you. I promise you, like, he wants you to achieve, like, greatness. He wants you to be the best you can be always. All right, um, I really do not know why this is flipped the other way. I don't like that, but I'll figure it out. Hopefully you guys are able to follow along even though it seems like it's flipped the other way when I'm going live. Anyway, so behavior patterns, this is how their model works. So everybody has human needs, all right? And our human needs— sorry if it's a little hard to read, but I'll have to get a better looking version better for you guys in the future. So we all have human needs. We want to live, we want to be loved, we want to love and be loved, want to feel important, and we want variety. Those are our human needs. That's what we need in this life to survive and feel happy and to just— like, that's what we need as humans, right? Now, we all have belief windows. We all have things that we believe, right? And we all— some of our beliefs are flawed, right? The way we believe. And another way to say is principles. Our belief window, the principles rules that we live by. Okay. We all have rules, right? If something— if we believe something, then if then that thing happens, we're going to react. We're going to have different actions or behaviors to those things, right? Does that make sense, everybody? Like, we are going to react because of what we believe in a certain way, right? It's the stimulus, like, is going to happen, then our belief around that is going to change what— how we respond, right, to that specific thing. And then what you do is once you understand what your belief window is, like what you believe to be true, how you react to it that causes your behavior, you ask yourself, is this giving me the way that I'm behaving to this stimulus or this thing the way I believe? Is it giving me the results that are going to be beneficial in my life? Is it giving me what I really need in life? Is it giving me— is it letting me live, right? Is it not allowing me to love and be loved? Is it allowing me to feel important? Am I having variety? So, when you're able to take what you do every day and involve God, right? And say, "Hey, God, Heavenly Father, please help me. I'm really struggling with this. Help me change my beliefs around this. Let me change the—" I can't change the stimulus necessarily because you can't really control what people do or what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it, right? With that space between the self-awareness and your response, right, to it. So this is what I do every morning, and I believe this can help everyone out. I ask myself in my self-reflection and daily repentance time— and guys, this doesn't take this long, it just takes some time to explain it to you, um, then to learn this— but I ask myself these 3 questions every day, and I'm gonna get vulnerable and explain maybe something that, like, uh, that will help you guys relate to this. Alright, so, the first question at the top of the reality model that I ask myself to identify these behaviors that I need to change is, what behavior patterns are not producing the desired results and don't meet my needs? Okay, so what did I do? What actions did I take? What did I do today that don't meet my needs of— sorry, don't meet my needs of being loved, loving, living, feeling important, variety, or being like Jesus Christ, right? Being— trying to be like God, right? What behavior patterns are not producing the desired results and don't meet my needs? All right. So let me think of one yesterday. Right. I'm going to write it down. So what behavior patterns? Let me think. I did. Let me see. I actually have it in my planner. Let's see what I wrote down. Let's see if I even want to share it with you guys. Let's see. Okay. All right. Well, I'll be vulnerable. So I got, got upset. And annoyed, and annoyed, right? With my wife, with my wife, because she was upset, because she was upset, upset. And it made the baby like— it was crazy. Our baby like just took off her diaper and she was She was a little bit, not of a monster, but she was— it was difficult to deal with our baby yesterday. She took her diaper off, poo was everywhere. It's kind of gross. But anyway, I was annoyed because she was annoyed with me and she was upset because of the baby, right? Right. The way the baby was acting. Anyway, so the behavior that I was feeling yesterday was— and that's not producing what I want. This doesn't make me feel good. Like if I'm annoyed at someone or frustrated or mad or angry, Right? So that's the behavior. Right? I'm reacting to how she's— how she feels. Right? So what possible beliefs are driving these behaviors? Like, what do I believe on the belief window? What do I believe that's driving me to be annoyed with my wife? My belief is my wife should always treat me good no matter what. That's the belief. It's like, I'm married, right? My belief is my wife should always, should always treat me like— be not— not— she's not treating me bad, but always be happy and like jovial and just super excited to see me, right? So my belief is my wife should always be grateful that I'm in her presence. This is all stupid stuff, but that's just how it is. That's my belief, right? And obviously we want that. I'm sure she wants that too. But that's the belief, is my wife should always be happy and nice, like, uh, and not frustrated. Not frustrated. That's a dumb belief, but then I guess that's— when I see her, I don't want her to be upset with me. I didn't do anything, but she's just feeling emotions, right? And her emotions from, from working with the baby who's getting wild. Okay, so what do I do now that I understand my belief, right, around— in my behavior to that belief? Like, I understand the— like, I'm doing— the stimulus is like my— what my wife is treating— how my wife's treating me. My response to that at the moment is like I'm annoyed with her because she's annoyed with me, and that's stupid, right? That's stupid. So the next thing is what alternative belief should I change in my belief window to produce better behaviors and results? Well, my belief needs to change that my wife doesn't always have to be happy for me to treat her good or not for it to affect me, right? So My wife can feel upset, and that shouldn't change how much I love her and treat her, change how I treat her. And I know you guys might be seeing this, you're like, dude, that's so dumb, like everybody knows that. Well, when you're in the moment and you get that stimulus, right, the— of what happened, and you don't take that time to reflect and use response, and you just respond, yeah, you're, you're gonna just react, I would say, the wrong way a lot of the time. And that's just— I'm just reacting, again, the natural man in me, the fallen man that just wants to be like everything the way I want. I want life to be easy. I don't have to struggle. I'm just gonna like react without thinking about it. But I can react now and say, my wife can feel upset and that shouldn't change how I treat her, right? So I do this every day, and I'm explaining this so it's taking a little longer, but I do this every day. I've been doing this for years and it's really helped me. I'm not perfect and I never will be, right, until, you know, the resurrection. And hopefully I can be, you know, a portion or of what, uh, you know, be like, be like God, right? I would love to just be as much as like my Savior, right? That's the goal, is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, to be like them, to follow and follow his invitation to be like him. But, um, I do these things so I can improve, right? And that's what it talks about right here in the emotions section. It's like Ponder these feelings and situations, then write down your thoughts. As you track your emotions, look for patterns and trends. Consider writing your emotions journal daily. So this is an invitation to like think about why your behaviors and your habits, like why you're acting the way you are, to reflect in that time period of stimulus and response, right? Like, I'm just gonna write it down for anybody that wants to see it again. And you guys can look this up. This is not just like something I made up, right? This is common knowledge. So there's stimulus. I'm going to be doing this. I got to make sure I'm spelling stimulus right. And then there's response to what's going on, that stimulus, right? Like what, what happens. And in that space, it's self-awareness. Or the freedom, you want to call it the freedom to choose. Alright, so next time something happens to you, right? Like, let's say your dog, this, I used to get really mad at my dogs, right? I used to get mad when they didn't listen. Because my belief around the dog was like, hey, you're an animal, you need to listen to me and obey every command. Because you're an animal and I'm a human. That was my belief around that. And then through doing this multiple times, I was like, oh my gosh, that's so dumb. It's an animal. It doesn't know. My dog doesn't speak English. It's not going to obey my every command all the time. It's an animal, right? So it changed. My dog doing things I didn't like. Let's see. I'm just going to write dog being a dog, right? I'll just say dog. My dog, and my response to it used to be getting mad at the dog. That used to be the response. But now it's like, it's a dog. I'll just try and do better at eliminating what it's doing, like taking away like a toy that it likes or something that it chews on or doing something, right? Like I'm changing how I'm responding because I've taken time to be self-aware. And I know I have freedom to choose. I'm a human being, like I can choose not to rely on the dog and the dog to affect how I feel, right? It's a dog, it's an animal. So this has helped me a lot. I hope that makes sense, guys. And the last thing I'll share with you is like this, this other model that, that I came up with. It's called the Priority Pyramid and Reality Model. It's, it's just another way to look at this. You have needs, you have your belief window, you have rules depending on what you believe and how you're gonna react, your behaviors. And you gotta make sure that those behaviors, if they give you the results, did it satisfy the needs? And the needs are love, variety, feel important, survival, survival, okay? And on the belief window, like what do you believe? Well, this is a different way to look at it. You believe in the framework for God, like why does God act the way he does? Like that's usually why, like, people's beliefs are usually centered around like their beliefs, like whether it's religious beliefs or like how they see the world, right? And the rules of how we react to those things, right, is— this is getting more spiritual and I would have to teach maybe a little deeper on this stuff, but it's God, what God wants us to do. He teaches us how he wants us to respond usually to stimulus and things, that happen, right? And it's usually the commandments, right? Like turn the other cheek, love thy neighbor. Um, and then the behaviors, again, this is kind of another way, is like, what are you doing every day to— at— when you respond to those things? Like, what are the things you do? Um, there's certain applications that we do off of God's commandments. Like, for example, if God tells me to keep the Sabbath day holy, that's like something I need to do. Then my behavior would be going to church every Sunday. Like, it's different applications to that commandment that everyone kind of does different. A lot of people do it differently, right? Like, go to church. Like, what are you doing on Sabbath day to keep it holy? Are you reading? Are you praying? Are you going to ski? Like, jump, bungee jumping, skiing? Are you going to parties? Really just depends. But it's just a different way to look at the model that they gave, the way I see it. So basically, that's what I wanted to share with you guys today, is, um, this way, that we all face— we all have bad behaviors in this life. We all— and, and a lot of it comes from like childhood, the way we saw our parents react, the way that we see others reacted, and things that we haven't like acknowledged that we do, right? Maybe habits that we've developed over the years, right? Like I used to have a bad habit of when I have ADD and ADHD. So I used to have the bad habit of someone's talking to me without even knowing as they're mid-sentence, I wouldn't— I'd stop paying attention. I'd go do something else or I'd pick up my phone and start scrolling on social media or looking for a dopamine hit because I obviously probably was at that point like checked out of the conversation. I didn't really— I wasn't really aware of that until I got married. I know it's sad, but I got married and my wife was like, why do you do that? And I was like, oh my gosh. Now, the reality model I'm teaching you guys, like asking these questions, didn't help me acknowledge that. It was more of my wife saying, which I say, I think being married and having a spouse or partner is extremely helpful to being self-aware and improving, right? Because they can acknowledge things maybe you don't, you aren't aware of, right? Or don't think about. But God can help you with these things. I promise you, like, if you have a weakness and you're like, man, I can't, when this stimulus, when this thing happens in my life, I always turn to this. And it's usually like a bad thing, right? It's like, oh, I get stressed at work, so I turn to drinking, right? I get— something happens, I get anxious, so I do this bad sin, or I do this bad thing that's not improving my life. And you have to have that ability to stop and think, right, what that thing is, right? What is that? That's like the freedom to choose, the space between, the self-awareness to say, okay, when I get stressed, I usually drink, right? This is not me, this is an example. I usually drink. What can I do when I'm stressed? What can I do instead, instead of drinking? Well, maybe I can go for a walk. Maybe I can read, right? Or maybe I can not have my phone around me as much, right? So I'll be teaching this a lot more. I like this topic because I think this is something I didn't really learn until I was older, maybe like my late 20s, like when I was like 29 or 30. I didn't know this. And the fact that God can help you with this if you pray, and you know that the fact that we have weaknesses but he wants to make them straight— I know that this is a possible thing that can help you guys improve in your life because it's helped me. And I'm not perfect again, but understanding these things and reflecting daily has blessed my life. So That's my invitation to you guys. Again, if you're interested in this planner, you guys can get it for free. You can get it for free on Kindle Unlimited, or you can just go to Amazon and get the printed version. I like to write in it because when you write things down, you internalize them. So if you guys just check this out, it's pretty simple. You just type in Self-Reliance Planner, or you can go to selfreliancewithchrist.com. That's my site. And then once you fill out your information, it'll redirect you, it'll send you a free course on how to use it. And this is the free course, and it'll send you to the Amazon site. So if you guys are interested, great. If not, all good. Just for me, this has blessed my life, so I want to give this tool out to people. I originally printed this out so I could stop going to Staples and printing it out myself, and it was costing me like $35 every quarter to fill this out because this is made to do quarterly. It was costing me like a lot of money, and it's a lot cheaper to print my own books on Amazon. So, uh, hope everybody has a great day. Again, remember that God is with you. I'm praying for you, like whoever you are. I pray that the world can improve and follow Jesus Christ. So, you know, at least I got your back. God has your back, and family They want everybody, you know, there's not many people that want to see you not succeed. So just know that, uh, you know, you got a lot of people supporting you, and I will see you guys on the next one. Peace out.