During the summer I spent time reading books and listening to lots of podcasts, all in an effort to rejuvenate my mind and heart. I read some great books and heard some amazing wisdom over these last few months, and I will try to share the highlights with you over the weeks and months ahead in my homilies, eBulletin articles and retreats.
One such book was “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg, a Stanford professor and founder of the Behavior Design Lab. It is a brilliant book about habits but even more about how one can change one’s behavior with intention and purpose. His approach to behavior analysis and design is fascinatingly obvious in so many ways. But that’s what makes a great book—when they name the obvious to everyone that nobody has ever been named before.
An obvious behavior to us is to celebrate immediately when we do something that we have wanted or tried to do, even if it is only a tiny portion of the way. The celebration can be an internal voice of cheer saying to yourself—great job Brendan, that’s the way to go. Or whether it is an external cheer—doing a little victory dance or fist pumps in the air while singing or saying, Yeah! I did it! It may seem silly, but we need to celebrate the little wins every day because there are plenty of losses or misses that tell us, ever so subtly—you are useless, you can’t make any of your goals, you are worthless! Those little negative statements can be devastatingly demoralizing to one’s self-esteem, and all of us hear that internal negative but rarely admit to it. Good human behavior starts with small steps that build us into who we are today, we don’t always celebrate those little steps along the way, but we should.
Let me illustrate with an example that Fogg gives in his book. Remember when your child took their first steps. We encouraged and coaxed them as we knew they were “getting their legs” and were close to walking. When they would get up off their bottoms and wobble on their legs we would say excitedly, “Come on, you can do it. Walk to mommy. You can do it. Come on.” Then they would take a few steps and fall into your arms while Daddy was trying to watch the whole episode on the video camera or phone. As soon as they fall in your arms, you would take them up into the air and excitedly shout for joy, “Wow! Awesome! You took your first steps!” The child sees all the excitement and next time tries even harder to walk more because they want more of the joyful response from everyone. WE celebrated and THEY walked more steps! Imagine for a moment when our child took a step and we scolded them, or shouted annoyingly, “What! Stop that walking!” I suspect they might never walk again if we did that.
The same is true for all human behavior. If we can celebrate in a small way every time we achieve some new desired behavior, then our brain is wired to repeat that behavior to receive the same accolades of affirmation. We keep repeating that celebration until the behavior is confirmed into a habit or action. But these little celebrations have to be close to the behavior itself otherwise the brain will not make the connection. If we only cheered our child for walking a week after it took place, our child’s brain will not associate the behavior with the cheer. And we don’t need to continue to cheer our adult children when they walk across the kitchen floor although sometimes, we are tempted to do it when they do something important like putting the dishes in the dishwasher!
The same is true for us as a community. Let’s celebrate our new desired behavior and help our brains lock in positive emotion with the new behaviors. This week school started for most elementary schools in the area and our St. Simon Parish School, and all Catholic schools opened this week. It was super exciting to see all the children back on campus. I love to hear the sound of their voices and screams. It is so quiet around here without them. I enjoyed visiting all the classrooms and celebrating their return.
This Sunday, August 20th from 1:00pm – 3:30pm, we will celebrate the beginning of the year with a short retreat for all catechists and ministers (all our welcome) in the Church and I will share some more insights about the Tiny Habits and how we can modify our behavior to our desires and in line with our discipleship in following Christ every day. We hope to model the behavior of our children to be great disciples of Jesus as a community of faith. Register here if you would like to join us.
Next Wednesday, August 23rd at 8:30am we will have our first School Mass and we will celebrate together the beginning of the school year with prayer and ask God to be a part of our journey of learning. We encourage all parents to come and join us. On Sunday, August 27th we celebrate the beginning of the Children’s Faith Formation at the 9:00 am Mass and give a special blessing to all teachers, catechists, and their students. We want to celebrate by coming to Mass because that is the behavior we want for us all, staying close to Jesus in our daily lives and community each week on Sundays.
To celebrate the start of the new school year and to inspire you, your family, and friends, we are hosting a concert with Francesca LaRosa on Saturday, August 26 at 7:00 pm. We encourage you to come to Mass this weekend as Francesca will be playing and singing at all Masses and Meredith Augustin joining us from New York City , who is a wonderful musician and singer. On Sunday, August 27, our popular Donut Sunday returns with our Ministry Fair in the morning and Pizza Night in the evening. We ask all parishioners to take time to learn about our ministries and take one new ministry each so everyone has a role to play in our community.
Speaking of community, I want to share with you a short update on the synod and the Diocesan Pastoral Planning. The pastoral team has been busy over the summer and the priests have met twice and given feedback. Our recent session focused on how to effectively communicate about the pastoral plan, even while the plan is a work in progress by emphasizing its goal of spiritual renewal for the diocese. We also explored the strategic priority of Youth and Young Adults. Facing the reality that 85% of Catholic youth drift away from their faith by age 17, we examined the high-level recommendations from the planning action team, both at the diocesan and parish levels, for prioritizing and enhancing youth and young adult ministry. We asked for your continued prayers as the teams across the diocese prayerfully and diligently work on the pastoral plan for revitalizing our diocese.
See you Sunday and let’s celebrate!
God bless,
Fr. Brendan